Peter Pan's Lemonade Stand

The View From Here: Freedom

2012-02-11T17:32:00.000-04:00

Freedom may very well be the most dangerous thing in the world. It's probably also the most desired thing in humanity, with the possible exception of sex.

The very concept of government and law could be described as the management of freedom. If you think about it, the complete absence of laws and governments would lead to a very messy world. What do you think would happen if everyone got used to the idea of no laws against things like robbery, murder, and so on.

Looking at freedom in the extreme gives some insight into human nature, which then leads to the interesting dichotomy between the world views of liberals and conservatives. Conservatives tend to hold to Judeo-Christian beliefs that human nature is normally sinful, and yet profess to allow freedoms that liberals would restrict. Liberals, on the other hand, lean toward the idea that human nature is normally benign, and yet insist on restricting the behavior and especially the business practices of the most successful members of society.

There is, of course, a third possibility; that there is no empirical Human Nature, and we're all just ourselves. And yet, so much of philosophy and religion is based on the inherant goodness or badness of us all that it's quite possibly true, one way or the other. Personally, my observations suggest that, while human nature seems to run strongly to the low side, it is possible for one to elevate one's self through the application of the will. And long-term study of Judeo-Christian scriptures would back this conclusion. Which means, we're bad, but we can choose to be good.

Which brings us back around to; what if there were no laws? What if we could do anything we want with no repercussions? Do you think that everybody would suddenly search for ways to help their fellow man? Do you think everyone would automatically be more accepting of everyone else? Would rich people become more generous in sharing their largesse with those less fortunate? Would crime end? Would war cease? Are these dumb questions?

So will the "people are basically good" believers reading this actually consider changing their minds, or is that also a dumb question?

Law is all about the restriction of freedom. Speed limits keep drivers from going faster than they can handle a car. And because just about everybody gets to use the roads, it's easier to set one limit for everybody, and then restrict the privilege of driving to those who can pass a basic competency test. Laws against murder keep those with anger issues from killing people they get mad at, but allow the government to kill those people as an added incentive not to kill for those who might insist on going ahead.

This manipulation, this system of incentives and punishments, is where law and government get more nuanced. Let's say, for instance, that we had a government that thought that the country was too dependent on petroleum products. They might start setting up a series of incentives that would discourage people from certain behaviors and purchases with an eye toward lowering petroleum use. They might follow a foreign policy that would put us at odds with oil producing nations, and then curtail domestic production forcing us to become all the more dependent on those same countries. This would raise the price of petroleum products like gasoline dramatically.

At the same time, they might throw as much money as they could get their hands on at alternative energy sources, probably wasting a lot of it but hopefully coming up with something that would wind up being a useful alternative for the nation's energy needs. The downside would be that these things would also badly slam the economy, possibly even in the long term. The upside would be that it would lessen the amount of power the petroleum industry would have over the country. Not that any government would actually do that . . .

It's kind of like the debate over slavery. The owning of slaves, and the submission to slavery, were probably seen at the time as economic necessities. The very founder of the nation of Israel, Jacob, was a slave for fourteen years in exchange for his two wives and a stake from which he built his own fortune. As noted in the picture above, slavery is talked about quite a lot in the Bible. Personally, I see nothing in any of it suggesting that God likes slavery, but it was a reality of the times in which the Bible was written.

The Bible offers advice to those who are slaves, and those who own them. At the same time, it is loaded with words about defending the oppressed and freeing those in bondage. So to say that the Bible "approves" of slavery is to prove you've never really read it, just taken a few passages out of context.

On the other side is a picture of two men who are probably gay. The caption opens up a common misconception about the Bible, and Christianity. What the Bible says, which is intended to reveal to humanity the mind of God, is that God does hate the act of homosexuality, while loving the practicioner. My own personal experience has borne this out. Indeed, the Bible is clear that this is the case with any kind of sin. Some Christians feel otherwise, proving that people really are faulty.

This brings us back to the difference between liberal and conservative political philosophies. Modern American liberalism, especially in the extreme, chooses to allow and even endorse behaviors that traditional Judeo-Christian mores view as "sinful," such as homosexuality, extramarital sex, drug use, and so forth, all in the name of freedom. Social conservatives would pass laws restricting these behaviors, and so liberals paint them as restrictive and even fascist.

Conservatives, on the other hand, allow business a much freer hand. The wealthy are seen as "job creators" and encouraged to do even more. The downside of this is that they tend to abuse the power their money and influence grant them. It's human nature, I suppose.

The reason I lean more to the conservative side is that the economy is better. Simple as that. Conservatives also tend to be far more open to religion. Many liberals make no bones about their view that religion is, as Mao once said, "the opiate of the masses." Or was it Lenin? Whatever. Conservativism also seems to be a fairly fluid thing. For instance, it's highly doubtful that you'd get any conservative Republicans to sign on to the reinstatement of slavery, which was something that Democrats were happy to allow to continue back in 1860. And it was Republicans that put the Civil Rights act of 1964 over the top.

As I've said before, the main reason I'm a conservative is that it leads to smaller government and a better economy. There are a lot of things that liberals want that I want, too, but I believe that smaller government and a better economy lead to them, too. All the basic things this series has been about; peace, prosperity, equality, freedom; are found through conservative government. And instead of being achieved through government intervention and managed by government agencies, they happen because of the action of the citizenry.

You see, freedom is dangerous. Freedom, as defined and managed through the Constitution, allows for things that many people don't like. It allows people to have sex with people that other people think we shouldn't. It allows someone to produce a product that many people want and are willing to pay for, therefore allowing them to become wealthy. We, the people, have to become involved in the ongoing process of fine-tuning our system of laws and governance to counteract expressions of human nature that benefit a few to the expense of the many. And we have to do it in ways that do not overly restrict the freedom that we all want.

It would probably be easier to put a government in place and simply take our hands off the wheel, allowing those people in government to make all these decisions for us. Then, we just have to hope that they're more capable of making those decisions than we ourselves are.

Rod the Mod

2012-02-05T21:08:00.001-04:00

Can't really say why, but one of my guilty pleasures the last few months has been to dig into the back catalog of Rod Stewart. Not the newer stuff, but going back to the early days of his career with The Faces. Frankly, I have no use for most anything he's done since breaking up with them; the odd song here and there, but don't have any Rod in my collection newer than 1973.

Looking back now, it's amazing how quickly things moved in the 1960's in popular music, especially in the latter half of the decade. At the same time that the Beatles and the Rollings Stones were conquering first Britian and then the US, Rod Stewart was banging around a succession of semi-professional folk and blues groups. During that time, between 1964 and 1967, the Yardbirds went through three guitarists that would go on to profoundly influence every level of rock and roll; Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page.

Beck left the Yardbirds in '66 and formed the Jeff Beck Group. They needed a lead singer and the finger pointed to Rod Stewart. It was probably Beck's commercial pinnacle, but only the beginning for Stewart. After two albums the group broke up. At the same time another influential British band, the Small Faces, was losing its leading light, guitarist/vocalist Steve Marriott. Stewart and Ron Wood, who switched from bass to guitar, joined Marriott's old rhythm section and the name was changed to just The Faces. At the same time, Rod signed a solo record deal with another company; he, with Mercury, and the Faces on Warner Brothers.

And so began a barrage of Rod Stewart-led albums that are still enjoyable today. His solo debut came out first, "An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down," known in America simply as "The Rod Stewart Album." This is probably the weakest piece of the collection, but gave a good indicator of what to expect. His folk and blues roots were placed front and center, and the arrangements featured the ragged-but-real Faces backing, along with a gaggle of others including Keith Emerson.

To be frank, it's a pretty weak effort, especially considering what was to follow. Having recently dug this out from the dusty stacks I was getting to the point of wondering how the hell this guy ever got signed. Then came "Handbags and Gladrags." Awesome song, with a light but interesting arrangement featuring Ian McLagan's distinctive piano and a sweet little chamber orchestra. A true pearl, tucked deep within a fairly tired oyster.

His next album, "Gasoline Alley," was a better version of the same idea; rootsy acoustic songs mixed with energetic stripped-down rock. More good songs, less dross. Things came together even better with "Every Picture Tells A Story," followed by "Never a Dull Moment." Personally, I consider Dull Moment his finest work ever. Both albums, and in fact all his albums, were an interesting collection of originals and covers, the covers ranging from old folk songs to contemporary rockers, made his own by his unique voice and the sloppy-but-happy backing by the Faces.

The Small Faces had evolved as an R&B-cum-psychedelic band that got far more attention in the UK than in the States. Marriott left to form Humble Pie, and his replacement by Stewart and Wood dramatically changed the direction of the band. They became one of those bands that defined the rock'n'roll lifestyle of the late '60's and early '70's as a rolling party. The sound was loose, but listening now the arrangements were pretty sophisticated. They must have actually practiced, although it often sounded like they just showed up and kicked into it. That's called, makin' it look easy. Seeing video of these guys on YouTube shows that they were not a bunch of hacks, but were actually very good musicians. I would be most interested in talking with a good drummer about Kenny Jones' style, which is very different from a lot of others of the era.

The inevitable comparison is between the Faces and the Rolling Stones. The artistic and inspirational relationship between the two bands is not unlike that between the Grateful Dead and the New Riders of the Purple Sage. Definitely similar, but in the grand pecking order the Stones outrank the Faces.

Unlike Rod's solo albums, those of the Faces started right out producing good, worthy stuff. Of their four studio albums, the third, "A Nod is as Good as a Wink . . . to a Blind Horse" is my favorite. And the last one, "Ooh La La" might be the weakest, but even that's pretty good. Stewart shared lead vocal duties with bassist Ronnie Lane. For myself, it's hard to listen to Lane without imagining how Stewart would have done the same tune. The one exception is a song from "A Nod," titled "Debris." A very nice little ballad that Lane does very well.

It was an incredibly creative, and productive, arrangement, but eventually the success of Stewart's solo career took its toll on the band. It would be comparable to having Mick Jagger solo albums coming out at the same time as Rolling Stones albums. The Faces were really trying to be a band, but half of their live sets came from Stewart albums on which they were mere backing musicians. So that was the public's perception; that even the Faces albums were Stewart, backed by the others. Egos being what they are, a parting of the ways was inevitble.

Guitarist Ron Wood, as the world knows, replaced Mick Taylor as the Rolling Stones' lead guitarist. Drummer Kenny Jones replaced Keith Moon in The Who, which didn't work out quite so well. Ronnie Lane did some solo albums as well as a collaboration with Pete Townshend, which I've never heard. He passed away in the '90's of multiple sclerosis. Pianist Ian McLagan went on to be a go-to studio musician.

And Rod Stewart went on to become Rod Stewart. After the Faces, he put together a proper backing band of tight professionals and spent the next few albums trying to recapture the loose feel of his older stuff. There's some pretty good stuff, but anyone who counts "Hot Legs" and "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" on his resume has questionable taste, imho. Some of his choices strike me as a bit odd. I mean, "Unplugged . . . and Seated," really? Who gives a rat's ass if he's freakin' seated?!?

And he certainly doesn't have what could be called a pretty voice. He gives people an excuse to say they like Kim Carnes. You know, "Bette Davis Eyes"? Or am I thinking of Bonnie Tyler, of "Total Eclipe of the Heart" fame? And . . . who cares? Personally, I liked "Forever Young," but not much else. And the idea of him singing old standards on his American Songbook series? Yeah, they're great tunes, but with Rod Stewart singing them? Hey, we've got songs made famous by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat "King" Cole. Who do we want to hear sing them now? Yeah, right.

So anyway, there's my thoughts on some very good recordings that are worth your attention.

The View From Here: Equality

2012-01-23T06:24:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, in my rural setting on the leading edge of the 21st century, I delude myself into thinking that this country has achieved equality. That assessment is incorrect.

As a conservative I am often blamed for that inequality. I'm sorry, but I cannot confess to that crime. I do not wish for anyone to have, or to be, less than I am.

So maybe the crime I am being blamed of is not one of commission; of holding other people back, of oppressing others, whoever they might be, whatever the reasons for our inequality might be. Maybe it's a crime of omission; of not using my superior position to help raise others up to at least my level.

In the political realm, this debate inevitably comes down to one of economics. Some people have more than other people. There are those who have a simple formula for equality:

1) Take everything of value and put it in a big pile.
2) Divide the total value by the number of people.
3) Distribute everything equally.

If it were this simple, I'd be all for it. I have reason to believe that I'd come out ahead on the deal. There are a lot of people who, when offered this option, think; "Hell, yeah! Sign me up!" And there are those horrified by the very thought, because they would come away with a lot, lot less.

I'm pulling this figure out of my sleep-deprived memory, but it seems to me I heard somewhere recently that the gross national product, the value of everything in the United States of America, is something like 14 trillion dollars. Let's be generous and round that up to 15 trillion. That's, 15,000,000,000,000; fifteen followed by twelve zeroes. And there's 300 million people, roughly. That's 300,000,000; three followed by eight zeroes.

For the purposes of this demonstration, the accuracy of those figures doesn't matter. The point is that I'm trying to figure out how much the above formula would get everybody. You could just as easily say that the GNP is X and the population is Y. If you could convert everything of value in the country to cash, the above figures tell us that we would each come away with $50,000. That's 50K for me, 50K more for my wife, and for each of my four kids, and for you, and so on down the line. There it is. Your cut. We're equal now.

And therein lies the subtle problem. We come back to the question of human nature. For some, it's more money than they've ever seen in one place in their life! Yeah, I told you this was a good idea!! You can get a damn nice car for a lot less than that. Put up in a fine hotel. Ring up room service and order us some champagne, darlin'. And how 'bout a little blow f'ya nose?

Other people would look at that paltry pile of cash, that small shoebox full of fives, and think; "What the flyin' heck am I supposed to do with this little bit?" Once they accepted the reality of it, they would start opening their eyes and ears. Pretty soon they would be drawn to our first contestant. Oh, you're looking for a car? I can make a car. Champagne? No problem. Cocaine? Let me get back to you on that.

Pretty soon one group of people would have nothing, and the other would have it all. So the only way the grand formula for equality could work is if you keep on doing it. As soon as one person was down to nothing you blow the whistle, collect it all back up, and do it again. We'll continue to do everything communally. We could call it . . . Communism! Nah, too harsh. How about Socialism? Sounds more social.

It wouldn't take long for the smarter people on all sides to decide that this sucked. After all, who would be in charge of collection and distribution? What's their cut? How do we know they're honest? And how can I tuck a little away in case I don't get what I'm expecting? For that matter, how do I get in on being a collector and distributor?

It can't be that simple, and it will never really be that way. Some people go into politics so they can nudge the country and the world in that direction, but it's a basically flawed ideal that will never see full fruition. For one thing, there's too many people pulling in the opposite direction. Let's cut out all the collection and distribution, and get down to brass tacks; you want something, I can get it for you. Capitalism!

Jesus said, "The poor will always be with you." So far, he's right, and it doesn't look like it's going to change any time soon.

Some say that economic inequality comes down to racism. This belief is how I manage the occasional delusion I describe in my opening paragraph. This country has set into law the illegality of discrimination, for reasons of race, of gender, and it's working on extending this for reasons of sexual orientation. And most people in the country, at least in the first two cases, agree with this. Racism and sexism are heinous. It's ridiculous, and cruel, to think that any race is inherently superior to another. And why shouldn't a woman make as much as a man for doing the same job?

A lot of people think that we have a long way to go in this area, but in my lifetime we've already come a very long way indeed. You tell a 21st-century schoolkid about Jim Crow laws, and they're shocked. Shocked! That the country they're growing up in could have ever had such laws on their books. Sounds like aparthied, or Naziism. And then when you tell them about slavery . . .

As I sit and write this, it's a little after three o'clock in the morning. I just woke up from a dream that shook me to my core. It won't let me go back to sleep, and I felt compelled to come downstairs and write this. I've been thinking for the last week about what I want to say on the subject of equality, but that dream blew it all away.

I am writing this "The View From Here" series of essays because these are the basic values I grew up with, and still hold to. I believe they are basic values that just about any intelligent person strives for. I think anyone in possession of both a heart and a mind wants these things for themself and everybody else. The political disagreements we have are more about how these things can be achieved. As a young man, I thought liberal political leanings could achieve them. Over the years, I have come to feel differently, and I'm writing these pieces to explain how that change took place.

Gone are the days when a man could stand on a busy streetcorner and espouse the belief that white people are better than black people. He'd be lynched! But in my own lifetime, that was not only possible, it was widely accepted as the truth. He'd have surely had his detractors, but he'd have also drawn a crowd of like-minded people. Go ahead and try it now, but be sure to notify the police in advance that you're doing performance art.

Anyway, in that dream I'm in a big high school or some similar kind of building, along with a large bunch of teenage kids of various races and backgrounds. I don't know why we're there, but there's the kids, and a small group of adults, of which I'm one. I'm wandering around the mostly empty halls when I come across a trail of blood droplets. I follow it, and soon discover a young black man who is obviously the source. I quickly decide that he's on his way to get help, so I turn and go the other way.

I have three such encounters; trail of blood, hurt black kid, turn and leave; before I realize what I'm doing. In each instance, the kids turns and glances at me. No expression, and they try to stand a little straighter and look like nothing's wrong. They say nothing, I say nothing. They keep going, I turn to leave. I know that they are going to be with their own kind. With people they trust, who they expect will do whatever they see fit to help them. And I am doing the same.

I might be better equipped to help that young man, those young men. I think now the logical thing would have been to follow them until they got to where they were going and offer my assistance. They should have medical attention, and I should find out who harmed them and do something about it. But I would have been one unarmed white man among a group of angry black kids. My instincts told me that my odds of success were limited, and that my safety could be compromised.

And so I went to be with my people and report this. Maybe my instinct was to assemble a group of benificent white people to go, as a group, to offer assistance. The problem with that is, in the time it took to do it, the injured boys would be able to tell their stories to their trusted group. When we showed up, we would fit the broad description of the people who inflicted the harm in the first place. Our group might have even included some of those people. We would go as a group to ensure our safety from a reaction our own appearance would have incited.

That's when I woke up. Not when that all happened, but when I realized that's where my chosen path was leading. And yet, I couldn't bring myself to turn back around and keep following the injured boys. And so . . . I woke up.

I had an experience once when I was living in Sacramento, California that has never left me. I was rooming with my pastor, who was another young white guy, in a mostly-black development. Nice enough neighborhood, and the rent was cheap. Relatively new buildings, nice lawns, and I don't think Sacramento has what you could really call slums. Then again, I'm a country boy. I wouldn't know a slum if I lived in it.

It was a nice day and I was sitting out on the lawn next to the sidewalk, writing in my journal with my new set of felt-tipped calligraphy pens. Things written with calligraphy pens look cool. So do bow ties and fezzes, but I digress. A young black kid, maybe 10 or 12, came by and asked what I was doing, and I told him. He sat down and watched for a moment, then asked if he could see my pen. I hand it to him. He looks it over, then drives the point into the cement sidewalk and grinds it to a frayed end. Then he jumps up and runs away. "Hey!" I yell after him.

Then he looked back, and he stopped. I think he expected me to jump up and chase him, all mad an everything, but I didn't. I told him he could have another one, and a piece of paper to draw on, if he promised not to wreck it. To be honest, I don't remember if he took me up on my offer, or if he just left. That was 1985. That kid's probably around 40 now, and I often wonder about him. I wonder if he graduated high school, if he stayed out of trouble, if he's married and has kids of his own. I wonder if he told his mom about what he did, and the crazy white dude who offered him another pen to wreck. Or if he even had a mom and dad. I wonder if he remembers me. I hope he's okay.

You could probably follow me for a few days and find clues that would convince you that I'm a racist, but I don't think I am. I certainly don't want to be, and I think that is important. I'm certainly not going to spend all my time worrying about every word I say and step I take and sweat whether or not it offends you. And yet the fact remains that I have chosen to be where I am. I could probably live cheaper in a different place, in a poorer neighborhood. But to me it's worth the extra money to live someplace I'm more comfortable. Around people who are more like me.

It's worth the mortgage and the property taxes and the heating bills, and so I have to find the best job I can in order to be able to afford them. And I have to work hard and try and advance my position in order to make more money. And I have to buy and maintain a car so I can get to a better job, that will pay me enough to get the car. And then there's things I like to do in my spare time, like play music and type ridiculous things on a computer.

Maybe it would be better if I went to a poorer neighborhood and did these things. It might be good for those people to get used to somebody different like me, and see me do the things I'm doing. If more of them did these things, their neighborhood wouldn't be as poor. Or, they could move. On the down side, my family and I would not be as safe or comfortable. But I still wonder, in my heart of hearts, if I'm wrong for not going. I'm not trying to justify the choices I've made. On the contrary, I seriously wonder if they're the right ones.

I want everybody to be equal. I think just about everybody wants that, but they want it without wanting it to cost them anything. Give 'til it hurts? Just how hurt are we talking, here? The Haves will never support a system that benefits the Have Nots at their expense. They will not allow it. They will group together and use their power to keep it from happening. And if you Had, you would, too. Be honest, now. Because if you really Would do it, then you Can do it, but you're Not doing it, are you? Think about that.

Is this racism? Is this economic oppression? Some think it is. And some conservatives say that the poor are poor because they choose to be. That's pretty harsh . . . but just for a minute why don't we consider the possibility that it might just be true? I'll grant you, it might be more fair if we could, one time, go to a base figure that everybody has. I still think the inevitable outcome would be a world greatly resembling the world we live in today.

Part of the political discourse I hear this year is about how those who Have need to be punished for it. After all, if they have, they must have stolen it. In a lot of cases, that's probably true. But which cases? If you know, and can prove it, aren't there courts? And if you can't, then do we just punish everybody who Has? Is it even possible for an honest person to achieve wealth? I like to think it is, but having never been wealthy, I guess I wouldn't know. And, maybe I'm not honest. How would you know?

Still, to a lot of the world, I am wealthy. I'm a white American male, one of the dominant demographics on the planet. I have more opportunities than any other group of people, economically, spiritually . . . sexually . . . Our neighborhoods have more banks, churches, and hookers than any other. Even our poor are richer than most other people's. Okay, maybe not all that's entirely true, but I came out of the womb with certain advantages, let's face it. I have majority status, in a wealthy country, and a penis. Who could ask for anything more?

But what if I had none of those things? Is Donald Trump bad, but Condoleeza Rice good? Or is Condi bad because she worked for a conservative administration? The point is, both are quite well off. And both worked hard to achieve it. Trump's "unfair advantage" was having a dad who made a small fortune in real estate. But Trump, through hard work and ingenuity, turned that small fortune into a very, very large one. As for Condi, she started literally as a poor black child and rose to head Stanford University, advise Presidents Reagan and Bush 1, and eventually served as Bush Jr.'s Secretary of State, after which she became a best-selling author. At the peak of her career she was, literally, the most powerful woman in the world.

And nobody handed her a thing. Yes, there are actually some people I've heard state she had an "unfair advantage" by being a black woman. She may have actually gotten something from Affirmative Action, and maybe even some liberal soft-heartedness from some people above her on the socio-economic ladder, but that could only get you so far. Her success is the direct result of her applying her intelligence and work ethic. Just like Trump.

So, no, things aren't equal. The playing field is not level. But hating those who are doing better gets us nothing. Yeah, sometimes I've expressed a certain dislike for some of the rich, but because they're assholes. They'd be assholes if they were poor, they just couldn't afford to express it with quite so much vigor. It's a personal dislike, not a socio-political one. I think I wrote a piece about this, too.

The reason I lean conservative is not in spite of my desire for everyone to be equal, but because of it. Less government intervention over our lives allows each person more opportunity to advance themselves. Maybe we come into this world with certain advantages or disadvantages, but what we do with them is up to us. Maybe that's why conservatism is so hard to sell. It doesn't come with a secret toy surprise. It comes with no guarantees, no safety net. I would agree that there should be a safety net, but it should be carefully monitored against abuse by the lazy. This is best done, I believe, on the most local level possible. That's conservative, too.

The reason conservatism and small government are hard ideas to sell is because it's a system that rewards hard work and ingenuity, and punishes sloth. Not out of a desire to punish, but simply by the fact that you don't get what you don't earn. It's a lot closer to raw, ungoverned life. You cannot, by rule of law, create equality. Human nature will not allow it. The people who now use capitalism for selfish gain will simply switch position and use communalism for selfish gain.

The important question is; what will you do? Will you strive for selfish gain? Or will you take some of what you've gained, and assist others? Will you run to your own comfort zone before offering a hand? Or worse, will you go there and barricade it against "those people?" Or will you reach out and offer grace, without asking who needs to be punished?

Golda Meir, a woman who survived the holocaust to become the Premier of Israel, once said something to the effect that there would be war with the Palestinians as long as they hated the Jews more than they loved their own children.

Neil Peart and Grace

2012-01-21T10:27:00.000-04:00

I have a short list of favorite musicians; not necessarily best, because I'm sure there are better musicians in the Classical and Jazz worlds that I'm not familiar with, and whose music I might not appreciate as much; but favorite, because they combine a high level of skill with the ability to make music that moves me deeply. This list includes Rick Wakeman, Steve Howe, Jon Anderson, Phil Keaggy, Carlos Santana, Jaco Pastorius, Pete Townshend, Robben Ford, Sonny Landreth, Miles Davis, The Edge . . . all right, it's a long list.

And on that list are several drummers; Terry Bozzio, Ringo Starr, Michael Shrieve, Carter Beauford . . . and a gentleman from Canada who, if I were forced to pare my favorite musicians' list to what I thought were the best three or four, I would simply have to include; Neil Peart.

One point I would like to raise, that there has been a lot of debate about over the years, and I have to admit I do not have the definitive answer for. It's about the pronunciation of his last name. Most people I know pronounce it PERt, like the shampoo. "And for breakfast she makes coffee that tastes like cham . . . poo," as Tom Lehrer once wrote. Sorry, ehem . . . Anyway, and some people have said PEARt, like the fruit. But in a radio interview about 1981 or so, during the promotional time for Rush's "Moving Pictures" album, the members of the band pronounced it PEErt, with the long E sound. I swear to God, that's how I remember it and have always pronounced it myself ever since. If I ever find out definitively that I'm wrong, I will happily change that, as I have the utmost respect for the man.

I know that, if I ever got the chance to meet him, which is highly unlikely, I would be completely speechless. Which would probably be fine with him. He has a reputation for being very shy around strangers, and frankly, I have nothing he needs. Certainly not my adulation, because he could get that anywhere. He might be pleased, slightly, to know that I fully intend to purchase the new album when it comes out, which I do.

The point of this is a public letter he recently put on his own blog, the link to which I will place here:

http://guitarsquid.com/newsletter/squidpick/neil-peart-qcant-resist-spilling-a-littleq-about-the-recording-process-behind-rushs-new-album-clockwork-angels/134/

This hooks you up with not only Mr. Peart's page, but also gives you a link to an excellent guitar-oriented site called Guitar Squid. I get their weekly newsletter, and click on more of its links than from any other newsletter I get.

In the letter he talks about the six months that have passed since his last missive, including details about his life, a recap of his family's Christmas, some background on the upcoming Rush album, and a little discussion of his spiritual beliefs. He reveals himself, certainly not for the first time, as a Pagan. He even makes a few mildly snarky remarks about Christianity.

To be honest, this didn't really surprise me. And, I know that as a friend and/or admirer, I'm not supposed to care what anyone's personal beliefs are. I should allow the same freedom of choice and expression that I reserve for myself, and this is certainly not unreasonable. It makes me feel good, in fact, that many of my friends have let me know that they appreciate that I don't shove a bible down their throats, even though everybody knows that I'm a Christian.

That pleases me, because I want everybody to know that I'm a Christian. But I also want to have friends. And I am very pleased that I have awesome friends. I could make a short list - certain to be shorter than my list of favorite musicians - of people who will read this, and I'd bet you're all my personal friends. I appreciate each of you, respect each of you, and - dare I say it? - love each of you.

And that creates a problem. Especially considering my age, because I am becoming increasingly aware of my own mortality. I know that I have fewer days before me than behind. That in itself is not a problem, because I believe in the immortality of the human soul. And, I also believe that, as a believer in Jesus Christ, I will spend that immortality with Him.

But what I've learned in twenty-eight years as a Christian includes the knowledge that nobody who's not one will have that privilege. And that saddens me. I will miss you who are non-Christians. And, I will miss Neil Peart. But that's his choice, and yours, and I won't infringe on it. No matter how much I might want to, even if I could. Which I can't.

In a way, I understand Mr. Peart's position. In his letter he comments on Charlemagne and the invocation of the US's Founding Fathers as examples of Christian hypocrisy, and he makes a good point. Christians are imperfect, and I have to count myself among them in that as well. That's one big reason why I'm a Christian; because I want to be a better person. The only reference Mr. Peart makes to Jesus Himself concerns his agreement with the shortest verse in the bible; Jesus wept.

What I would suggest, to him and to you, is that you not look at Christians, but at Christ. We Christians are admittedly faulty, flawed, prone to being considerably less than perfect, just like . . . well . . . everybody else. And I don't believe in Christ because I'm scared to believe in anything else, or because I'm just too stupid.

I'm a Christian because for my first 28 years I looked deeply into the world, life, and as wide a variety of philosophies and religions as I could find. And by March 14, 1984, it was clear that there was an obvious choice. And in the 28 years that have followed, I have tried to keep my eyes, ears, and mind open. And Christ, His Holy Spirit, and His bible, have never left me wanting for a more satisfactory answer. I looked at all the options and decided of my own free will to hand my entire life over to Jesus Christ. And I have never, not once, regretted it. I go to church because I want to. And if I ever don't want to, I'll stop.

I must admit, I do not know precisely what heaven is. But I do know where. It's here, with me, in me, all the time, every day. It's not some pie-in-the-sky grand prize I'm waiting the rest of my life to see and hope I haven't lost my ticket for. I'm already there. There are many times I have felt like I'm looking through a window at the world. That I'm safe, in a place that can never be breached, safe from all harm, for all time. Not because I deserve it, or that I've worked hard enough and followed the rules tightly enough to earn it, but because Jesus loves me and gave it to me, expecting nothing in return.

What I want most of all, for the people I admire, for the people I love, is for you to be in here, too. The door is open, and there's a window nearby through which you can look in. What you see will undoubtably be as confusing for you as it was for me when I was looking in from the outside. That's because in here, we're still human and behave too often like humans. Watching us for an example instead of Christ would be a big mistake.

Anyway, that's up to you. You know what I believe, and if you want to know more, just ask.

Recently a couple of people that I work with, who play off each other like a well-oiled comedy duo, started riffing on Christians and how closed-minded and bigotted "those people" are in general, mostly in regards to something that some politician or other had recently said. I admit, I got rather heated about it all. I stepped into the middle of the workroom floor and very loudly stated that I am a Christian. Then, I asked everybody if that was what they thought I thought. Because if they all thought that what these two comedians were saying in any way represented me, or any Christian that I personally knew, then they were mistaken. I didn't jump on them for saying it. In fact, I reminded everybody that it's a free country, and everybody has the right here to say and believe anything they want. But if that's what they thought of me, I reserved the right to dispute it.

Not surprisingly, nobody said anything at the time, and we all went back to work. Over the course of the day, most of the crew came up and assured me that they didn't believe that of me. Some of them even made it a point to tell me that they, too, were Christians. Of the two comedians, one apologized, and one never said a word.

I'm not mad at these two. In fact, I count them as friends, and one of them may be reading this. I just wish that they could see what I see, from where I see it. And the same for Neil Peart. Because if they let the bad things that Christians have done keep them on that side of the window, that would be a crying shame.

Comment on "Prosperity"

2012-01-14T22:35:00.000-04:00

A very good friend of mine, John McLaughlin, had a very extensive comment that wouldn't fit in the comment section, so I'm posting it. Thanks, John:

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Rick,

My response to your latest blog was too long to publish on your page so here it is:

OK, a lot to comment on in your recent article about money…

Now I was in total agreement with what you said up until “Capitalism doesn't even really require money” when I had to chime in, as I am chiming in right now. Capitalism, by definition, or by my understanding of its intricate workings, requires capital. Capital is wealth, in some form, but most commonly a physical type of wealth which means assets such as found in the asset section of a balance sheet. This would exclude non-tangible things of value such as non-property type information, skills, love, etc. (otherwise communism would require capitalism to function in a physical world, and I would think we are trying to exclude that economic system here).

Barter is an attempt to make a good deal in order to exchange one asset for another of higher value, thus creating profit during the transaction. Often it is not a creation of profit that occurs though; it may just as easily be a reduction in a loss. Though it is a type of financial transaction, not all financial transactions require a capitalistic system to be performed, as those who toiled at jobs in the Soviet Union would attest. Anyone who trades labor for anything is a laborer, not a capitalist. If you were to trade someone else’s labor for something, and pay them less than you were paid for their labor, then capitalism has occurred.

An easy way for me to think of what capitalism is would be that it is the accumulation of temporarily unused assets. I have a collection of guitars. Let’s assume something untrue for a moment for my explanation to work. Let’s assume they are appreciating in value. Since I have more of them than I can play at one time, I have accumulated capital. My capital would be the ones that I am not playing at the moment. Perhaps I have band mates who are playing them and we are generating revenue with those instruments. In that case they would be defined as “working capital.” Let’s assume further than I pay each of them 17 cents per hour to play (I use this amount because this is exactly what my friend who is serving time in Florida on a felony conviction gets paid per hour. I think they wouldn’t pay at all except that it would be defined as slavery.) In this scenario I am a capitalist.

If instead of paying the guys 17 cents per hour we all split evenly the money we made from our gigs, then instead of being capitalists we would be socialists/communists, assuming the owner gave only one of us the money and that person divided it up. If the person receiving the money pocketed a portion (without divulging the true income to the band members) then divided the rest up, is that person a capitalist or a corrupt socialist? Therein lies the socialists’ definition of capitalism as corrupt.

The Star Trek concept is wonderful and it is derived from the assumption that “Game Theory” will eventually lead to an evolution in social and economic systems. Go to Wikipedia and look this one up ‘cause it is very informative. I first heard about it from a mathematician and close friend of mine who I shared a house with in Costa Rica. His most salient points had to do with Cooperative and Non-cooperative games as applied to societies. Star Trek requires the cooperative game as the operative one. Whether or not capitalism is an immoral version of socialism isn’t the real important point (immorality is a value judgment based on a pre-defined set of moral values, and since we are all individuals we will never agree 100% on what is right or wrong, except in those cases where we allow someone else to set our own standards for us: a topic for another long winded discussion). The important point is that mathematically a non-cooperative, competition based system is less efficient than a cooperative system.

It is the desire to get something for nothing or for far less than the typical required effort which defines greed. Greed is a failure of human nature, not of an economic system. Capitalism works better for the greedy, thus it is their preferred system. It will remain the dominant economic system until human nature changes and greed vanishes or becomes taboo. At that point some type of cooperative system will emerge (“will” shows my optimism, though I know it isn’t going to happen in my lifetime).

So why am I a libertarian (or quasi-libertarian) when I know that capitalism is flawed? It is because the larger the government is, and the more government employees, the more opportunities for corruption. Human nature being what it is I prefer the honest corruption of a capitalist to the dishonest corruption of socialism. Keep the assets and power away from the government and let society and the individual have more control. What I need from the government is protection of my property rights, ONLY. Let me defend myself if someone wants to kill me. That’s a pretty good incentive for me to not anger anyone. But what about murderous maniacs? We don’t live in a tribal society so I don’t have much concern about that. The occasional sociopath can’t be stopped from doing bad deeds any easier by the government than he would be stopped by a free society.

John

The View From Here: Prosperity

2012-01-13T19:36:00.000-04:00

The object of this particular series is to discuss some basic things that pretty much everybody wants, and the different ways that various political systems offer us to acquire them. We've looked at peace. Now, it's time for prosperity.

Just about any form of spirituality cautions us to be careful of prosperity. Humility is encouraged, poverty is a virtue, prosperity leads to temptation. That's a gross oversimplification, but there's a grain of truth behind it. To approach it from the Christian perspective, because that's the one I'm most familiar with, we all the time hear that the Bible says, "Money is the root of all evil." The actual quote, in 1 Timothy 6:10, says "THE LOVE OF MONEY is the root of all evil."

Money is just a tool, like a hammer or a guitar pick or an AK-47. The tool isn't evil, but its operator can be. And some tools lead to temptations that can hurt people. Hypothetical situation; an angry looking man is walked straight toward you, a nasty look in his eye. Would you rather he was carrying the AK-47, or a five dollar bill? And no whining about paper cuts!

What the Apostle Paul is saying in his letter to Timothy is that, when money itself becomes the goal, you're off the rails. We want prosperity because it makes our lives more comfortable, and usually makes it easier to do the things we wish to do. When the work the tool is needed for is done, the tool gets put away until the next time its needed.

So there. It's okay to prosper. Just keep your head. Now, what's that got to do with politics?

Have you ever heard the phrase, "zero sum game?" That's an economic concept that suggests that there's only so much. If Bill Gates has fifty billion dollars, somebody else doesn't have that much. If that were true, then there'd be the same number of dollars in the country as there were when George Washington took office. The problem with making more dollars out of thin air is that they become less valuable. But it's still not a zero sum game, because there's more of value than there was back then. Back when five dollars would buy an AK-47, they didn't exist. So it's okay to print more money, as long as more stuff of value is being made also.

Another faulty political concept is that, in every financial transaction, there's a winner and a loser. Isn't that a cheery thought? For instance, you buy a car. Either you, or the dealer, is getting ripped off. But why is that? Does the car not meet your expectations? Does the dealer refuse to honor the warranty if something goes wrong with it? Yeah, that sometimes happens, but you still have a recourse, in court if necessary. So did the dealer get ripped off, and you're the evil profiteer? Then how did he get that nice big building and all those salesmen? And for that matter, all those cars to sell?

Think about all the transactions that you participate in. You get stuff to make lunch with. Gas for your car. Maybe you work in retail and sell these things to others. Or maybe you help manufacture things that other people buy. And the company you work for pays you to do it. Or you work for yourself, providing a product or service for a fee. Are you evil because you charge enough to cover your overhead and keep some for yourself? Are you more evil if lots of people buy things from you, and you make a lot of money? Are you robbing all those people?

Again, money is a tool. Some people can use their tools to manipulate or hurt, but that's not inherent in the process. Capitalism doesn't even really require money; it can involve barter. I play guitar. I could write you a song, or perform for you, in exchange for food, heating oil, or whatever else you've got that I need. Money is just a widely-accepted medium for determining value. Let's say I charge you $150 to perform. For that, I could get maybe 50 gallons of heating oil, or groceries for my family for a few days, or part of a car payment. The promise of regular payments gets me a car. Whatever the medium for assigning value, what's to say who the winner and/or loser is in any of these transactions?

Like it or not, capitalism works. It's probably the original economic system. It's the simplest; I have something you want, you give me something I want in return. A transaction between two parties. It's not without its problems, though. If one person is cleverer than the other, and suffers from that love-of-money thing, then a situation arises in which there can be a winner and a loser. A-a-a-nd here comes the loser, bearing an AK-47. I'll, er, be right back. Good luck.

I happen to be a big Star Trek fan, in all its various forms. It envisions, not only the technological advances that could come about in the next three or four hundred years, but the utopian society we will be living in. One with no money. One in which everybody will be able to do what they are passionate about, and will be given the materials to do so. The assumption is, for every guitar player, there will be people who love to make guitars, to cut, store, and provide wood, to grow and harvest the wood, to make the strings and other parts, and so forth. It's a very cool concept, and actually has the potential to work if everybody is on board.

But this raises another very basic, and very important question; what about human nature? One could argue at length about whether or not human nature is basically good or evil. It raises an interesting dichotomy at the core of political thought. Liberal, progressive, secular, humanistic concepts are supposed to be about freedom and equality, based on the concept that human nature is good. But countries that have this basic concept as a template tend to be the most restrictive. Christianity, on the other hand, teaches that human nature is essentially evil. And yet conservative, Christian, individualistic, capitalistic political thought focusses on freedom from restriction, especially in the area of business.

Which brings us to another basic truth; conservativism and capitalism are thought to be bad because they allow corrupt people the freedom to behave, uh, corruptly. Nice, restrictive socialism keeps them from acquiring all that tempting money and allows them to find their basic, good, nature. In the Star Trek universe, Bill Gates would be a happy, humble computer repairman. He could creatively innovate for a publicly-owned company that would give its products away to people whose burning urges led them into all sorts of endeavors that computers could help them with. Like blogging. Or designing peaceful uses for AK-47s.

Yeah, right.

Anyway, you can think or believe what you wish, but this is part of why I'm a conservative. Prosperity, for myself and for the country as a whole, is easier with a free-market economy. But people, I believe, are basically flawed and need a certain amount of oversight by the government to curb their worst instincts, so I'm not a libertarian.

A Triumph of Ambition

2012-01-11T20:27:00.000-04:00

Well, the New Hampshire Primary was yesterday, as I write this, and I wanted to share my thoughts on it. I have to say, the final outcome was pretty much as expected, what with Romney winning and all.

As you may have gathered if you’re read anything here recently, I’m not that big on Mitt Romney. It’s not so much about what he stands for, as who. It’s clear that he’s owned, body and soul, by a small group of very powerful people. The kind of people who provide what they call Super-PACs for hatchet work, for instance. It’s not that I object so much to Mitt’s ideas, it’s that I don’t think he’ll do anything that his Masters don’t want him to do.

That brings us to the crux of the biscuit; the Tea Party. You do know that TEA stands for Taxed Enough Already, right? To me, it means a little more than that. Not only are taxes already too high and too often wasted, it means that I’m sick of the Powerful People having everything their way.

And this vaunted New Conservatism is the most insidious thing of all. Big Business gets the freedom to rip off anybody they want, and to solace the “victims of unfairness,” endless expensive band-aids are applied to the real problems without there ever being a real solution. Jeez, I sound like a liberal!

But it’s been my complaint about conservatives for decades; if it’s the way to go, then it’s the way to go for everybody. So why don’t any Republicans go to Harlem and the barrios and explain how it works to their benefit? If they could go and explain it, liberalism would cease to exist! Because, maybe, deep in their hearts, they really don’t care about “those people”? And you wonder why the perception of the Republican party is that it’s for white males only?

Anyway, I digress. The Tea Party is for people who remember what Lincoln described; government by, for, and of the people. And so there’s Romney, who represents in many ways the worst impulses of the Republican party, and then there’s everybody else.

It’s not really a surprise that Ron Paul came in a strong second. He is, in a way, one of the fathers of the whole Tea Party movement. (So is Ross Perot, but we don't like to admit that.) Even if you disagree with some, or most, of his ideas, he’s a compelling force. His positions are long-held and well thought out. I think a lot of it is that he has more faith in basic human nature than I do, but that’s a debate for another time. One thing nobody doubts is that, if he’s elected, the special interest groups of all stripes can go take a flying leap off a rolling donut. He will do as he sees as being best, and that’s that.

He’s a funny guy, because I really think he knows he’s never going to be President. He’s 76 years old, fer cryin’ out loud! His whole thing is to educate the voter, and he’s very good at it. I’ve learned a lot from listening to him, even though I didn’t vote for him. I listened to his concession speech last night, and the line that really got me was when he said, “I didn’t know all you people were out there.”

That leaves the other four major candidates; Santorum, Huntsman, Gingrich, and Perry. There are subtle differences in their ideas, but on the whole I think the Tea Party movement would happy support any one of them. The problem is, there isn’t one of them, there’s four. And as long as there’s four, then Mitt Romney stays the frontrunner. Romney’s real support is about 20-25% of the Republican voters, mostly The Party Faithful. The Four Horsemen of the Tea-pocalypse have a lot more taken all together. But they’re not all together. Their personal ambitions have overrun their ideals.

And each of the four are still viable! Santorum came very close in Iowa and essentially tied for fourth in NH. Gingrich was briefly the frontrunner, and is leading with his Southern roots going into the Southern states. Huntsman did as well as he could hope for in NH, so he’s hanging in there. And Perry’s got a ton of money and is another Southerner.

The image that keeps getting referenced at this point is one of a circular firing squad. It’s one that will probably leave Romney the last man standing. Ron Paul will run until the convention, no matter what, but I don’t honestly think he’ll ever get enough backing to ever be more than second. Pretty soon, second place will be last place. The other four will continue to pat themselves on the back every time one of them finishes third, but third is nowhere. If nobody but Romney ever finishes first, then he’ll win.

What I’d like to see the other four do is get together in one room and put all their cards on the table. So far, they’ve each followed their ambition to become President. It will be the end of them all if they continue. They each need to look deep inside and think about why they went into politics in the first place.

I would direct your attention to an Eddie Murphy movie called “The Distinguished Gentleman.” It concerns a con man who decided to run for Congress, because a congressman with the same name as him has just died. Going in as a scammer, he winds up reformed and serving his constituents.

The truth, of course, is that it usually goes the other way around, more like it’s described in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.” Mr. Smith – Jimmy Stewart – finds that the Senator he’s always admired has sold his soul, piece by piece, to special interests until he’s as corrupt as they are. And all in the name of compromise.

Now, I’m sure that Mitt Romney doesn’t think of himself as corrupt. He thinks he’s using those backers of his to get in there and really do some good for people. For the little guy. And he can keep doing good for them, as long as he’s careful not to offend anybody. And the oil companies and pharmaceutical companies aren’t really manipulating prices and access to their products and limiting competition to fatten their own bottom line. They’re honest merchants, just trying to make a buck.

Yeah, we the real little people would probably be better off with Santorum, or Perry, or Gingrich, or Huntsman. Well, maybe not Huntsman. But if they would all put their pride and ambition aside for a season and pick one for the other three to back, then maybe that one would have a chance of getting the nomination. I don’t care which, and I don’t care how. Draw straws. Go by alphabetical order. Play a round of poker, have a foot race, a brawl, anything! Just pick one! One, and only one. And the other three come out with strong endorsements, stump appearances, and hand over their staff rolodexes. And they'd better be quick about it, because the train is leaving the station. They might survive South Carolina, but if they wait until after Florida, then they might as well all tie for eleventh place. None of them will have a chance.

I just had this image of Rick Perry with a black eye, saying, “Yeah, after a lot of thought, I’ve decided to support Rick Santorum.” With Gingrich sitting in a chair rubbing his shin, and Huntsman wearing a bandage on his nose. Santorum would stand up, one tooth missing, and grin at the audience.

And Mitt Romney would soil himself.

The View From Here: Peace

2012-01-03T06:50:00.000-04:00

Peace is one of those things that everyone wants. Well, not everyone, of course, but regular people do. And the constant refrain that I'm always hearing is that peace is more than just the absence of war. But the absence of war is a large part of peace, especially from the political point of view.

I have to admit, I hold a certain admiration for people who absolutely reject violence for any reason. You've kind of got to admire anyone willing to put everything on the line to take a stand. Their argument is that the world would be a better place if everybody renounced violence and war and simply refused to do it. That's a wonderful sentiment.

The trouble is, absolutely everybody has got to sign on. All it would take would be for one guy to decide he liked that idea and he could go around robbing and killing everybody else, and never have to worry about any violent repercussions. The non-violent of the world would have the choice of wringing their hands and hoping he decided to stop, or just accepting that they were no longer safe.

That's why I can't vote for Ron Paul. I don't think his foreign policy ideas are born out of a devotion to non-violence. They seem to be coming from his core libertarianism, in which everybody has the right to do whatever they want, as long as they don't bother anyone else. I get the impression he believes that, for instance, if we don't stop Iran from attaining nuclear weapons, they won't bother us. One hell of a gamble, if you ask me.

There happen to be people in this world who, for whatever reason, are bent on harming others. It wasn't my idea, I'm just reporting what seems obvious to me. They might be sick, mentally unstable, fearful, hateful, whatever, they're going to do it if we don't strap them down and heavily medicate them. The people that flew a couple of airliners into the World Trade Center could have stayed home and hoped that Ron Paul won the next election, but they didn't. They were as devoted to what they thought was right as the people squatting on the quad at Dartmouth College, swearing that they'll never swat another mosquito and wishing George W. Bush had died at birth.

The point is, sometimes a small war is better than a big one. In fact, I would think it usually is. If a person, or a group of people, is bent on harming you, you owe it to yourself to stand up to them. Not out of hatred. Just because somebody's got to make them stop. And if you have the wherewithall to make them stop, then you should do it. If it takes killing them, then I guess you've got to kill them. It will keep them from killing you and other people as well.

It seemed to me that this was the motivation for the US going into Afghanistan and Iraq. There were people there that had made it clear they wished us harm, and were going to work to fulfill their wishes. We had to make them stop. Is there reason to believe that oil companies or Haliburton or other rich and powerful people had a stake in it? Probably, but it still needed to be done. I've heard George W. Bush compared to Hitler and Stalin, but never to Neville Chamberlain.

I believe that peace, political peace between nations, comes from strength. The United States is in a unique position in the history of the world. We are a country that, despite all the potential for corruption, is still at its core run by its populace. As such, we look at the other peoples of the world as people. We basically wish them well, as long as they don't screw with us. For such a country to actually have the strength to enforce its will is a good thing for everybody else. Historically, our enemies wind up our friends, with all the benefits. If they're smart enough to take advantage of that, then being attacked by us could well be the best thing to ever happen to Afghanistan and Iraq.

The sad but simple fact is, peace is something that has to be built out of broken pieces.

Two old albums

2011-12-29T22:43:00.000-04:00

Recently, I've been listening to a pair of albums that were released within a few months of each other. When they first came out, almost 40 years ago now, I had mixed feelings about them. Now, listening to them again after many years, they have become two of my favorites. And the most surprising thing, especially considering the two artists, is the deep similarities between them.

Cat Stevens was coming off a creative and commercial highpoint. His previous two albums, "Tea for the Tillerman" and "Teaser and the Firecat" would each eventually go triple platinum. Most of the songs people remember him for, "Wild World," "Peace Train," "Moonshadow," etc., came from those two albums.

This album, released in the fall of 1972, went quickly to number 1 and stayed there for three weeks, but then slipped just as rapidly down. I was one of the people that put it up there, and I was one of the people that was somewhat disappointed with what I heard. The songs were more experimental, the performances more strident and emotional than we were used to from the man who sang "Morning Has Broken."

And yet, something about the album kept me coming back. At the time I didn't like it as much as its predecessors, but I kept on getting it out and playing it. It was as if I knew there was something there that I was missing. The first song, "Sitting," was the only single from the album that made the top 40. That song, I liked immediately and have been frustrated for 40 years because I've never been able to do a servicable version of it on acoustic guitar. The second tune, "Boy with the Moon and Star," was a very pretty little ballad. After that, it got a little too heavy, too murky for my taste.

Listening to it now, I can't believe I didn't see how good the songs were. There's not a clunker on the whole album. The first two songs sound just as good as they ever did. The songwriting is more mature and consistent than much of "Tea" and "Teaser." I cannot figure out now why "Can't Keep It In" failed as a single; it's a great song.

The one I keep coming back to now is deep in the second side (for those of you who remember vinyl record albums; you know, those big black CD's?). It's called, "The House of Freezing Steel," and as many times as I've heard it I have no stinkin' idea what it's about. I'm amazed that Metallica has never thought of doing a cover of it. Whoa! Great idea!! Don't tell Metallica, I'm going to try and get that done myself!

"Silent Sunlight" is a beautiful ballad, of the type that Stevens is noted for. "18th Avenue" is a multi-layered experiment that meshes three distinct movements into a relatively short song. "O Caritas" is mostly in Greek, but you won't care; it's passionate and exotic and seals the deal with a last verse that translates the idea into English so you can enjoy it more fully. It's the sort of album that is deep and thick and keeps pulling you in. It's got catchy melodies that you'll hum for hours. Songs that will get stuck in your head, and you won't mind a bit.

And the other album, in its own way, is just as good, and just as startling.

This one came out in 1973. Most of it was written during the American tour in support of "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars." Sorry, I just had to type that all out. It's a great title. And, it was a great album, and the first one that really broke David Bowie commercially. If anything, this follow-up was even better. It was more rounded, more mature as a piece of songcraft, and yet more schizophrenic. It's a roller-coaster ride between hard rock and pre-war show tunes and hits many of the buttons in between.

My very good friend, John McLaughlin, turned me on to this album when it came out, and did so again last summer when he gave me a new copy of it. When it came out, one had to be careful in declaring themself a Bowie fan. It made a statement. His image overshadowed his music, which is unfortunate, because his music has always been, if not great, at least interesting. But liking Bowie had the sad consequence of saying something about you. You either rode with it, or suffered from it.

The two dominant players on Aladdin Sane are guitarist Mick Ronson and pianist Mike Garson. Ronson was Bowie's main creative collaborator at the time, having come up with him from obscurity. He was the kind of guitar player that every garage musician in the neighborhood wanted in their band. He was no Hendrix or Clapton, but he sure could make smoke come out of the speakers. He had exactly one sound, but it was a good one. And, he had imagination enough that he could keep up with anything Bowie could throw at him. Garson was already a seasoned session man and would spend the next couple of years in Bowie's band before going on to a rich, full career in and out of the studio.

The two together added a creative tension to the album as it swung back and forth between them. Songs like "Watch That Man," "Panic in Detroit," and "Jean Genie" belonged body and soul to Ronson. Garson ruled in songs like "Time" and "Lady Grinning Soul," jazzy tunes that sounded like they should have been sung by Liza Minnelli and Joel MacRae straight out of "Cabaret." His tour de force was the title tune, with the most manic, maniacal piano solo ever recorded. Worth the price of admission all by itself.

If anything, the two were at their best on songs in which they found common ground. "The Prettiest Star" is very piano-centric, and yet Ronson adds guitar work that take it to a whole new level. And their version of the Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together" is a classic. I recently read a review of the album that panned that tune, but I strongly disagree. Garson takes the main riffs, freeing Ronson to spit fire all over it.

It's a dark, happy album; an exercise in sophisticated disconnectedness. Spastic nihilism with a kickin' backbeat. The album has been called inconsistent, but I think it is very consistent.

And that brings out the chief similarity between these two albums. They both see a world that is going to hell in a handbasket. The difference is in their reaction to it. Stevens looks deep inside, looking for some meaning and a way to make things better. He hopes there's a way it can all be made to make sense. Bowie sees it as being out of control, but refuses to give in to despair. Instead, he strikes up the band and has another drink or anything else to make himself feel better for a moment.

Here's a challenge that I'm thinking of trying my own hand at. I think these two albums are complimentary enough that they could be merged onto one CD. I would be interested in seeing what order anyone reading this would put the songs in. If anyone's interested, I'd be happy to put my own song order out there for your examination.

Anyway, I'm hoping this will give you a reason to check these two albums out. I think you'll be glad you did. They are both very worthwhile.

The View From Here: Introduction, pt. 2

2011-12-23T23:17:00.003-04:00

Part 2 is a quick review of my track record of voting in the NH Primary. One of the coolest things about being from, and living in, New Hampshire - especially if you're a political junky - is the first-in-the-nation primary. It is ground-zero politics at its very best. People vying to become the most powerful person on the planet have to go into little coffee shops and stand on street corners and eat rubber chicken in hotel ballrooms with average people like . . . well, me! It don't get no better than that.

The first election I have a clear memory of was 1964. My parents were both life-long Democrats, and Dad was very proud of the fact that his first vote was for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I am one of that group of people who remember where they were when they heard that President Kennedy was assassinated. The very idea of anyone voting for Barry Goldwater in '64 was . . . just weird! I found out later that my father-in-law's first vote was for Goldwater.

In '68, both my parents wrote in Johnson for the primary, and voted for Humphrey in the general election. '72 was a different kettle of fish. I don't honestly remember who my folks backed in the primary, but they both went for Nixon in the general election . . . and I actively campaigned for McGovern. That made for some interesting dinner conversations.

The first NH primary I ever voted in was 1976. It was an exciting year, especially if you were a Democrat, because they could have nominated Bugs Bunny and he'd have stood a good chance against Gerald Ford. Remember that this was the election after Watergate. I took a long, close look at the entire field. I really liked Frank Church and Morris Udall, but in the end went with Jimmy Carter. You have my sincerest apologies. It won't happen again, I promise.

By 1980 I was so disgusted with both parties that I didn't vote in the primary, and went with whoever was the Libertarian in the general election. I don't even remember the guy's name. Ed something, I think. Also, I can now tell a secret I was sworn to never reveal to my father. He was so disgusted with Carter that he voted for Reagan. But the real secret is that my mother voted for John Anderson, the Republican who ran as a third-party candidate.

In 1984 I was living in Sacramento, California and had to watch the NH primary from afar. I really liked Gary Hart, but agreed that he needed to quit when the whole sex scandal thing came out. I'm sorry, scum shouldn't be President. By the time of the California primary, it was all decided. And, by that time, I was a Christian and was viewing things from a new perspective. To my amazement, I found myself voting for Ronald Reagan in the general election.

By '88 I was back in NH and jumped into the primary process with a vengence. I changed my registration from Democrat to Independent, where it has remained ever since. I looked long and hard at the field from both parties, as there would be no incumbent on the ticket. Believe it or not, I seriously considered voting for Jesse Jackson, but the Republican field held more fascination for me. By this time, I was a believer in supply-side economics.

I wound up with a short list of three candidates; Pat Robertson, who most of my Christian friends wound up voting for; Pierre "Pete" DuPont, a former governor of Delaware who had some very cool ideas but couldn't get any traction; and Jack Kemp, who quite literally wrote the book on conservative economics. I voted for Kemp, but by the general election came to really believe that the best man for the job was George H. W. Bush. And, I think he was an excellent President.

1992 was very frustrating. I really liked Bush as President. Plus, after Desert Storm he looked like a shoo-in, so all the major Democrats like Mario Cuomo bowed out. But then Pat Buchanan reared his ugly head. I don't care, I don't like the man, never did, never will. Everybody blames Ross Perot for the end of Bush, but I blame Buchanan. I believe he, more than anyone else, gave us Bill Clinton.

The Republicans put out a weak field for '96 in my view. My wife and I both wound up voting for Allen Keyes. In my case, it was as much for the statement it made as a belief he'd make a good president. Held my nose and voted for Bob Dole in the general election, and was pleased to also be able to finally cast a vote for Jack Kemp, even if it was for VP. Backed Keyes again in 2000, and happily supported Bush, Jr. in the general election. Again, as his father had, he won me over slowly as the year went by.

In '04 I missed a chance to vote in the primary for the first time in a long time, as Bush had the incumbent's chance of the nomination and no Democrat impressed me enough to jump over. I thought 2008 was another very weak field, and I went for Rudy Giuliani. I did vote for McCain in the general election, but more because I thought Obama would be as bad as he is than any belief that McCain would be much better.

This year, I'm still up in the air. I'm probably 50% ready to vote for Gingrich, but may write in Herman Cain or Condi Rice at the last minute. This is, I'm sorry, the weakest field in years. Maybe in my lifetime. There is absolutely nobody running that I really like. If Romney gets the nod, I may stay home for the first time in my life. We need a leader with a vision, and Gingrich may be the closest thing we have. Which, to my thinking, is a damned sad state of affairs.

Then again, times like this are what makes leaders like Reagan look so good. Let's hope there's one in training right now, gettting ready for 2020.

So now you know a lot of my history. Boring, pointless, but don't forget where you come from. And, if you're actually interested enough to have read this far, you might be surprised to learn that my values haven't changed a whole lot, even if my politics have. At any rate, the introduction is over.

The View From Here: Introduction, pt. 1

2011-12-21T22:51:00.000-04:00

This is the first part of something I've been thinking about writing for a long time. It's a series of pieces on my basic political philosophy. The reason for it is that many times I find that people are confused by my arguments. They want to pigeonhole me as something, and I profess a belief or stand on an issue that goes against what they think I am.

In a nutshell, I believe there are certain basic things that everybody wants, whether they're conservative or liberal, democrat or republican, red or blue, old, young, or whatever. These things are:

Peace
Prosperity
Equality
Freedom
Security

Liberals and Conservatives, and so on blah blah blah, all want these for themselves and promise them for society as a whole. The disagreements come from differing views on how to achieve them. I plan to write a piece about each of these things, and what I think it will take to achieve them on a political level. But politics is only a small part of life, and to really understand why I believe what I believe, you have to understand the ground on which I stand to get the view I see from here.

I was about eight years old when I learned that my parents had me baptized at the United Protestant Church in Dorchester, NH. This made me curious as to what that meant. Not that we ever went to church very often, but my mother had an interest and occasionally, sporadically, we went. Thinking back, I learned more about Roman armor than about God, but like I said we didn't go very often. My father had a much more skeptical view of religion, but did not completely dismiss it. He just wasn't scared to ask questions about it that might make a true believer uncomfortable.

So I started asking my friends whose families went to church what they knew about Christianity. And, I have to admit, I wasn't overly impressed with what they had to say. It seemed to me a bit simplistic. So I began looking at other religions and systems of beliefs. By the time I joined the Navy at 17, I was somewhere between Buddhist, Athiest, and Communist. From there I explored the realm of the supernatural through yoga, meditation, astrology, and drugs. Followed a lot of gurus, didn't get much in the way of results.

In my late twenties I read a novel that made quite an impression on me. I don't remember the name of the book or the author, but it was about a young woman who was on a similar quest to mine. She hooked up with a spirit who guided her on her spiritual quest. She ran afoul of some other spiritist/magical types, and was surprised and pleased to learn that her spirit guide could successfully defend her against them.

I had experienced limited communication with various spirits by this time, and was a firm believer in the existence of supernatural beings. One of my major goals was to have a positive influence on the world, and I knew that any effort on my behalf in this direction would put me on the wrong side of some powerful people. So I knew I needed to hook up with as powerful a spirit as possible if I was going to be able to do any good.

You see, when I began my search I already had a goal in life. I wanted to be President. I had a number of other sub-goals, like rock star and/or race car driver/designer, or maybe journalism, but these would lead into a political career and eventually the Presidency. Hey, if you're gonna dream, might as well dream big.

After a while, like when I got to about 20 or so, I realized that Presidents come and go, but artists are forever. It is arguable that Elvis or the Beatles had more influence on the world than Richard Nixon or John Kennedy. After all, the most a President could serve was eight years, but Elvis is still capable of a hit, and he's been dead for more than thirty years. So I started playing guitar and writing music.

But I needed to have the right message, and that led me through the world of philosophy and religion, and up to the point of seeking out a powerful spirit guide. If possible, the most powerful one of all.

And I found him! In a most surprising place as well. By this time I was 28 and going to college in Sacramento, California. I met up with a few people who professed to be born-again Christians, and found them quite amusing. One in particular, a Davis California native named Rick Nixon (perfect guy to meet when you're a political junkie) was a classmate in a Theater Arts class. Our class went on a field trip to San Francisco to see Shakespeare's "A Midsummer's Night Dream." We got there early, so he and I went off to get some lunch. When we got it, he bowed his head to pray, and I thought, "Oh, boy."

I was merciless, challenging ever preconception he might have had and exposing my own prejudices. And he was not able to answer all my challenges. But neither did I shake his faith. What he stood on was simple; he knew Jesus Christ, and nothing I could say or do could take that away.

So I started looking into Christianity from a new perspective, and found myself being challenged. It was not, as I had surmised in the third grade, a simplistic bunch of rules. It was a personal relationship with an entity known as Jesus Christ. If what I read was true, this was that 'most powerful spirit' I had been looking for. Only one problem; he was unwilling to simply be a guide and help me with my mission. If I was going to have a relationship with him, he would have to be in charge.

It made me think about what I'd learned about the supernatural. The spirits I sought connection with lived on a plane that I could not access. I had been convinced that I was the one in control, but they were moving and acting outside of my knowledge. It was entirely possible that they were manipulating me, and letting me believe what I wanted to believe. At least Jesus was being honest; his way, or the highway. If I was going to be with him, he would be the boss.

At this point, I had a choice. I could walk away, knowing that if I ever came up against him I was guaranteed to lose. Or, I could give up everything I had ever wanted and follow him. It was a choice that was no choice at all. I asked him to take over my life. And he did.

And it's not exactly been easy. I'm now 56, which means twice the age I was when I made my decision. And the main thing I know is that I still have a lot to learn, and a long way to go. My job here on this planet is to be the best example of a Christian that I can be, and I am sorry to say I've been a damned poor excuse for one too many times. But there's nothing else worth doing in this life. I'd rather be a simple, unknown, working class Christian than a rock star, a race car driver, or the President.

So anyway, this is my perspective on life. Any system of government is only as good as the people living in it. To make the country, and the world, a better place, I have to be a better person. For that, I need enough power to overcome my worst impulses, and enough wisdom to know the way to go. Who better to give control of my life to than God himself?

It comes down to this; God created everything and everybody, and loves his creation without reservation. So, he is all-knowing and completely trustworthy. Jesus Christ is the physical embodiment of God, and lived a human life to reveal himself to humanity. The Bible is the most complete and trustworthy expression of his mind, written by a long line of people who he inspired and led. And I trust this because I am, for lack of a better term, possessed by and in communication with the spirit - commonly known as the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost - of God.

And no, he doesn't operate me like some invisible puppeteer. He doesn't do that with anybody, and never has. Which is why there is so much evil in the world, because he doesn't go where he's not invited. The significance of this to my political beliefs is that I prefer a political structure that allows me to act on God's behalf to affect the world in a positive way, along with other Christians.

And one other thing; every religion, Christian and otherwise, has built into it a concept of heaven; a perfect place, where it is possible to live a perfect life. This heaven usually includes the things I named above; peace, prosperity, equality, freedom, and security. Every nation on earth has been an attempt at creating something close to that heaven. It is my belief, as an amateur student of history, that 21st-century America is the closest there's ever been to that heaven. With all its flaws, all the corruption, all the uncertainty, have there really ever been a people as blessed as the average American?

So this series, The View From Here, will be my ideas on how this country is like, and can be more like, a perfect place where a loving God leads His people in His perfect will. Hope you like.

Rick's Quadrennial NH Primary Voter's Guide

2011-12-11T18:35:00.001-04:00

Hi. This being the second time I've done this, so I guess we might as well go ahead and call it a tradition. I'm planning on writing something soon about my own personal political philosophy, but I've kinda been doing that right along. What this is about, is me trying to figure out who I'm going to vote for in the NH Primary. A quick disclosure; I'm registered as an Independent, and would have no problem with taking a Democratic ballot if someone on it sufficiently moved me. But since I lean conservative, I'm going to do my usual and take a Republican one.

I've also been giving serious thought about setting up a group of categories and tying them to a ten-point system. That would make me vote for the person with the highest score, which might or might not be a good thing to do. Maybe I can work that out for 2016. Consider yourself warned. In the meantime, I'll toss around the prototype version.

MITT ROMNEY

I've already written about him, so go back and look it up. Don't be lazy, now. I don't actually think he'd make a bad president, he just wouldn't make a particularly good one. He's running on the hope that the Un-Mitt-of-the-month will keep rotating and he'll outlast them.

Remember that points system? The two most important catagories, to my way of thinking, are Competence and Ideas. In the first, I'd have to give him 8 out of 10. He's probably one of the smartest, most capable candidates in the whole race. But on ideas, I'd have to give him probably 3, and that's being generous. His big plan for the future of the country is, "No, really, I AM a conservative." That is, unless he gets the nomination, then he'll be whatever else anyone wants.

He said in a recent debate that his plan will create 11.5 million jobs. He never did say which jobs, or where they'd be, or how much they'd pay. I earnestly believe he was just making up a number. The way to create jobs, as any Conservative will tell you, is a combination of tax cuts and easement of regulation. This will stimulate business and there come the jobs. But there's a lot of things that need to be done, and a lot of the Obama agenda that needs to be dismantled, and I just don't believe he'll do it.

I think he's the one Obama wants to run against. He's the one Barack will have the best chance of beating, and if he loses, there's a good chance he can make a comeback in '16, saying "See, he didn't do anything, I'm the one with the vision."

NEWT GINGRICH

The Un-Mitt of the month, and maybe the last one. Again, competence 8. He could walk in the door and do the job well, without question. He's very smart, very articulate, and a total policy wonk who knows what he thinks and how to explain it to the people in fly-over country. He's flawed, but doesn't waste a lot of time backpedalling away from it. Yeah, he's screwed up a few times, but if the choices become him and Obama, who ya gonna pick?

On the other side, I give him a 4 on ideas. Once again, not a guy for big sweeping changes. He is more likely to dismantle Obamacare, though. Obama's campaign will be all about character, and it will have to be, because he has to keep his real ideas secret and Newt doesn't.

RON PAUL

I believe the Republican party ignores this man at its own peril. It would be wise to focus the bright light on him and his ideas, and air them out for the public. I think many of his supporters, if not most, back him because the party hates him without really knowing what he stands for.

First of all, he's a Libertarian, and a former Presidental candidate for the Libertarian party. Libertarianism looks good on paper, but in reality it's borderline anarchy. It's fine, if you feel comfortable blindly trusting big business. One thing for sure, the economy will boom, until one or two of them decide they can make a big killing by kicking off another depression. Remember, a super-friendly business climate was what led the Harding-Coolidge boom years into the crash 1929. And also remember that every sudden downturn manages to somehow benefit a small handful of people. Just like the people who are going to cash in long-term on the bursting of the housing bubble.

Secondly, his foreign policy strongly resembles that of John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of State. His concept was called "Fortress America." He thought we should pull completely out of Europe, Asia and Africa and concentrate on North and South America. Let the Commies and whoever take over their half, we'll handle our half.

I know there are subtle differences, but that's essentially what Paul is suggesting. Let the Taliban and Al Queida and whoever have Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever. That's what will happen if we pull everybody out and "stop playing the world's policeman." If you're cool with that, vote Paul.

Points? Oh, yeah. 7 for competence, but minus two because he'll never get anything through congress. And 7 for ideas, because at least he's got some. But again, minus two, same reason.

RICK PERRY

I wish I could make a TV ad for Rick Perry. I'd have him sitting at a big desk, talking on the phone. Then looking in a file folder. Then talking with a staffer that comes dashing in. Another phone call, along with a quick but steady glance at a computer monitor on the desk. All the while, a voice-over is reading from the US Constitution regarding the duties of the President. It would end with something like;

"Okay, he's not the smoothest on TV." And then, tying in to ads he's already running; "We've already got someone like that. This is the part that guy's not good at."

He's desperate, and he's throwing out anything that pops into his head in hopes something will stick. It's not a good sign. If he were to behave like that as President, it would be bad for the whole country. Especially considering that some of his ideas are totally bananas. I actually like the idea of a part-time congress, but what congressman will vote for it?

I would give him a 6, maybe 7, for competence, because he's already running a very big state and apparently doing a pretty solid job. And another 6 for ideas, because again, he's actually got some. I have no doubt he'd take Obamacare apart as quick as he can, and bend heaven and earth to cut taxes and ease regs.

But that's not enough!

MICHELLE BACHMAN

Another former Un-Mitt fave. A few months ago she was a shoo-in to take the Iowa caucus. Now, she's third or fourth. She's toast. Rolling Stone ran a savage piece on her right after the Iowa straw poll she won a couple months back, and it's worth a read. Not that I buy most of it, because Rolling Stone is aimed directly at the most sold-out corners of the left. The piece was not there to convince any Republicans, it was there to scare people who would never vote for her in a million years into thinking she had an outside chance. And she may have, back then, but it's gone.

She's Sarah Palin light. She's a conservative true believer, all the way. But now, with the pressure on, her cracks are showing. I'm finding it instructive to see how some of these people are acting on the roller coaster. Her "Hey! Me! Me!" act is one of the most distasteful. 3 for competence, because I think she'd be in way over her head in the oval office. But 5 for ideas. Might be a good VP choice, and the on-the-job training would be good for her. Definitely better on TV than Dan Quayle.

RICK SANTORUM

Why is this guy still here? He was a good Senator, but lost his seat in the '06 purge. Another guy who could use the VP experience. He's one of the few left that hasn't had a turn being the Un-Mitt of the hour. His official nickname should be, "oh, him." Competence, 5 (maybe), ideas, probably 6. Too bad he doesn't stand a chance. Sorry, but losing a senate seat does not qualify you for the White House.

JOHN HUNTSMAN

The answer to the musical question, "Does Mitt have a younger brother?" Or maybe, "Whatever happened to Tim Pawlenty?" Mitt in a cheaper suit. Same moderate credentials, less credibility. Governor of Utah. If him, why not a governor of Alaska? Competence, 4; ideas, 2.

PEOPLE I WISH WOULD RUN

There are a few people I would seriously consider voting for if I knew anybody else that would, too. See if any of these names ring any chimes for you:

Herman Cain

That's right. I was on the verge of voting for him, and still might. Not that I think he's the most capable man in the world to do the job, but because of the message he'd send. I'd vote for him for that message, and if he won the whole ball of wax I wouldn't have a problem with it. Competence, 6, ideas, 6.

Then we come to the sexual harrassment charges. If they're true, all bets are off; he would deserve to not only be eliminated from consideration for President, he'd deserve to be strung up by his vital parts. But if not, then he's proof of how easy it is for lies to destroy somebody. In the media, there is no such thing as "innocent until proven guilty." I think it's telling that, now that he's out, all that seems to have gone away. Funny, huh?

I would agree that the 9-9-9 plan has holes, but at least it's an idea. He's another one I'd like to do an ad for, and it would be mostly like the one I'd do for Perry. I think he could do the job, and do it pretty well.

Sarah Palin

Yeah, I know, but I believe she'd actually do the job quite well. I think it would have been better for her to remain in the governor's mansion in Juneau, but oh, well.

Condoleeza Rice

Who? Are you serious? Most definitely, pilgrim. Brilliant person. Read her book, or any number of books about her. Check out a book I found in a dollar store called "Hillary and Condi." Back in '05, pundit and former Clinton staffer Dick Morris wrote a book about what he thought was going to be the '08 race. He gives a lot of background on Condi, and I'm sold. I was anyway. She's very accomplished, cool as a cucumber under pressure, and is three steps ahead of everybody. She also seems to have to ability to see things from more possible angles than anyone out there. I'd vote for her in a heartbeat.

Her record as the head of Stanford University is most telling. She took it over when it was deeply in debt. When she left eight years later, they were well into their biggest expansion ever AND had $14 million in the bank. Also, she has an interesting attitude toward affirmative action. She's for it as far as taking someone on, but against it in regards to tenure. That means, being a minority or a woman can get you a job, but you advance completely on merit. A good, pragmatic solution, and one I agree with.

On the whole, it's a pretty uninspiring field considering how much is at stake and how easy it should be to beat Obama. Oh, yes, before I forget . . .

BARACK OBAMA

His name will also be on the ballot. Not on the Republican primary ballot, but definitely on the one in the fall of '12. He should be considered in all this.

You've probably gotten the impression that I'm not going to vote for him. My wife, who happens to be very well informed and quite brilliant, disagrees with my assessment of him, so you might want to take it with a grain of salt. She thinks, for the most part, that he's just in over his head and doesn't really know what he's doing.

As mentioned, I disagree. I look at Obamacare, the national debt, the bowing to other world leaders, the fire sale to China, and I see the groundwork being laid for a unified world government. In that world, our debt would be shared with China and everybody else. We would be one of the movers and shakers in that world, but not the biggest one. I think he sees it as inevitable, and he's betting everything on it.

I think he has a vision, and is building for the long haul. It's something to think about. I know some of you reading this would be cool with that.

I have to say, his election makes me proud of my country. Having lived for 56 years, I've seen a lot of changes, and it truly blesses me that we could elect an African-American. But I knew at the time he was a far-leftie, and he's done nothing to prove me wrong. His ideas are fatally flawed, and he's a lousy president, just like I knew he'd be. If he wins re-election, he'll have to do it with fear. Either he has no ideas, or his ideas are so extreme he doesn't dare say them out loud.

If it's the former, then I'd have to give him a 2/2. If the latter, 8/0. I can't wait to read the book he writes after he returns to civilian life.

Songwriting Analysis: Tools and Materials

2011-12-04T08:44:00.001-04:00

You may not know this, but as a New Englander, I do; a wooden covered bridge will outlast an open steel-and-concrete one. This one, near my brother's house in Bath, has been there since 1832. The reason that this bridge was made out of wood in the first place is, of course, there was a lot more wood available in Bath, NH 1832 than there was concrete and steel. The idea of covering it is probably part of that whole reputation that New Englanders have for being pragmatic. If you're going to build a damned bridge, you only want to do it once, so you might as well protect it as best you can.

In a nutshell, you use the materials you have to do the best job you can.

Writing a song is a lot like building a bridge, in certain ways. Songwriters, especially modern ones who tend not to know so much about music theory, tend to write for the tools they have handy. Guitar players write songs that they can play with relative ease in relation to their skills. So do piano players, trumpet players, flautists, etc.

For guitar players who like to play close to the nut with lots of open strings, the chords most likely to appear in their songs are G, C, D, Am, and Em. We've pretty much summed up the history of Country and Piedmont Blues right there. If they're electric guitarists who are rockers and like to use a lot of barre chords, the most prominent keys to write in are E and A. It's notable that both Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn, who had big hands with long fingers, liked to play Fender Stratocasters (which have a longer, 25.5 inch scale) and played close to the nut (where the frets are further apart) and consequently wrote a lot of songs in the key of E. This meant they didn't have to squish those big fingers together up on the fifth fret where the key of A was more accessable. Their limitations and preferences dictated their writing style, or at least affected it.

It's the same for players of other instruments. It's the reason that you don't hear many trumpets in bluegrass, or banjoes in be-bop. Banjoes, mandolins, and guitars are tuned to play in keys like E, A, G, C, and D. Trumpets and other horns are more comfortable in Bb, F, Eb and stuff like that. I guess that explains why Miles Davis and John Coltrane never jammed with Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs. Shame, that.

I have been listening a lot in recent months to how piano players write their songs. Billy Joel, Elton John, Leon Russell, Jerry Lee Lewis, Barry Manilow, Bruce Hornsby, and all of it being brought back home again with my recent acquisition of Harry Nilsson's All-Time Greatest Hits. As a songwriting guitar player, I have found it very educational to play a lot of other people's songs, and some of the stuff I have the most fun with is songs by piano players. I just love trying to figure out how to do an interesting version of a Billy Joel or Elton John song on the guitar. (I guess I'd better learn a Manilow tune, because now somebody's bound to ask.)

The histories of the keyboard and the Western system of writing music are closely intertwined, to the point that both are rooted in the key of C. On a piano, organ, or synthesizer keyboard the white keys are a C major scale. To play in any other key, you have to use black keys. The same with the musical staff; all the lines and spaces are notes in the C major scale, and to write any other notes requires the use of sharps and/or flats.

So the most common keys, especially for any modern pianist who doesn't have a lot of training in music theory, are C and Am, both of which can all be done on just the white keys. After that, the key of F (or Dm) is widely used, because this only requires replacing the B with a Bb. And, the key of G (or Em), in which the F is replaced by F#. Then, it's the keys of Bb (or Gm) which has two flats, and D (or Bm) which has two sharps. The physical limitations of the instrument dictate its use.

Furthermore, any piece that involves horns will use the keys with flats instead of sharps, because most horns are tuned to Bb or Eb. Throwing in a flute limits the choices further, because the flute it tuned to C. So if you've got a piece written for piano, trumpet, alto sax, and flute, you have to be very careful because the four instruments are tuned to be most comfortable in C, Bb, Eb, and C again respectively. Driving you crazy yet? Then don't throw in a guitar! (And if you do, make sure he brings a capo.)

What, for me, makes piano songs most interesting is how easy it is to use secondary and tertiary chords. For those of you to whom that is confusing, it means simply this; think of chords as colors. In the visual world, the primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. All the other colors are mixtures of those. Purple is made from red and blue. Orange, red and yellow. Green is yellow and blue. That means that purple, orange and green are secondary colors. Colors made of a mix of a primary and a secondary would be tertiary; quite literally, the third level. (Go ahead and Google "Teriary colors" for some cool stuff.)

Musical chords are the same way. The primary chords in any key are the root, the fourth, and the fifth. So, in the key of C, your main chords are C, F, and G. Each chord is made up of three notes; the root, third, and fifth notes. So the F chord is made up of an F, an A, and a C. These are actually the 4, 6, and 1 notes in the C major scale. A secondary chord off the F would use any two of those three notes. So instead of the F chord, you could substitute Dm (D, F, A) or Am (A, C, E). Bdim and C would be tertiary chords of F, using one note from the F chord, and could be used to replace an F chord in a chord progression. Got it?

What makes piano writing so cool is how easily these secondary (and tertiary) chords are accessed. If you're holding your fingers to make a chord, all you have to do (at least in the key of C) is to hold your hand in that same position and move it to a different place on the keyboard. Move up one key from a C chord and you're making a Dm. One more, an Em. Cool, eh? Where it gets difficult is when you play in keys that require sharps or flats, because then you have to adjust at least one of the three fingers to move from a white key to a black key, or vice versa.

Simply put, the physical limitations dictate its use.

If you liked this, and want me to ramble on some more about basic music theory and songwriting, it would be my pleasure. Thinking about writing this piece kept me up half the night anyway, so it's good to have a place to stick it. So, if you like this and want more, just say; "Rick . . . stick it!"

Facts and Figures

2011-11-26T10:13:00.001-04:00

Hi. Found a tool that might be useful, and thought I'd share it with you. I've just started fooling around with it myself, and it's been fascinating.

The problem is, both sides of the political aisle go on and on about taxes, federal revenue, and so forth and so on. One side says that we have to raise taxes in order to raise federal revenues, the other side says that raising taxes will actually HURT revenue flow, and that cutting them will increase it. Then you have Ron Paul, who thinks we should cut taxes until it hurts revenue and just spend a lot less.

But the politicians go on television and talk about these things as if they were privvy to secret information that no one else can know, and it's simply wrong. Taxes are paid publically, the rates are written down in black and white, anyone's tax payments can be made public and they are all the time. The information is there. It's damn well time that we took the time and made the effort to see just where our money is going.

What I'm sick to the teeth of is being treated by politicians and power-brokers as if I were stupid. We are ruled by sound bytes and slogans and are expected to salivate on command whenever certain key phrases are issued. Job creators. Top 1%. Wall Street. Main Street. We are expected to decide whether we are conservative or liberal, and then just blindly follow the leaders of the catagories without question.

Well, I don't trust any of the bastards. I think anyone with power skews the game to benefit themselves. It's human nature, and I'd probably do it if I were a billionaire. Yes, I would go in trying to do the right things, but it's inevitable that the necessity for compromise would arise and I'd begin to sell out a piece at a time. Anyone who says they never would is kidding themselves.

One of the greatest things about this country is that we, the average folks, actually have the power available to us to level it back out. But it takes effort, and intelligence. So I've Googled "Federal Tax Revenue," and the first thing I clicked on was this:

http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/

It's not an official government website. It's put together by some guy named Christopher Chantrill. He's probably got a political agenda, but I haven't yet figured out what it is. Whatever it is, most of the site seems to be facts and figures. In two clicks I got to a page that breaks down federal tax revenue for fiscal 2011, by half a dozen different catagories. There are links to past fiscal years, along with deficit figures, budget figures, and a bunch of other fascinating stuff. It looks like a good place to start finding out how much money the federal government really takes from us and what they do with it.

So if you find anything useful, feel free to put a link to it in the comments section. People, we're never going to be able to run this country right if we don't educate ourselves. The politicians have no interest in helping us, so we've got to take the initiative. I don't know about you, but I want to know what's going on. If I find anything interesting, I'll post it, but you really should look for yourselves.

Songwriter's Workshop

2011-10-24T21:31:00.000-03:00

The Warren United Methodist Church hosted a songwriter's workshop on Saturday, Oct. 22, 2011, and I thought I should tell you about it.

In a nutshell, it would appear that everyone in attendance had a blast. Two fellows from the Bristol UMC came, and one woman from the Tilton UMC. It was promoted mostly through the NH-VT Methodist district, as "Songwriting from a Christian perspective," but everybody was invited. We were hoping to get 5 or 6 people to come, but it worked out to be a good-sized group overall, giving everyone plenty of opportunity to get a word in and play several of their own songs.

Also there were three very good songwriters I invited to participate in a roundtable discussion. There was Jim Tyrrell, from Campton, NH, who is one of those rare local musicians who's actually making music for a living. He has several CDs out and has toured extensively. We've played in a couple of bands together, and I have immense respect for him. He talked a lot about a website he's a member of called Songfight. It's a tool for exercising your "writing muscles," and he played a couple of songs he wrote for them. Basically, they give the group a title and everyone has to write a song on that theme. My personal favorite was "God Hates Penguins."

Sky King was also there, who is a very good friend and one of the best natural songwriters I've ever known. He actually does have considerable knowledge and background in the nuts and bolts of music, but his songs feel so natural that you might be tempted to think of them as old, traditional songs. "The Carpenter's Song" stood out for me.

Tod Moses rounded out the group. Tod is from Thetford, VT but is originally from Ohio and spent about 20 years in Nashville on the edges of a big-time music career. He learned the craft of songwriting from the pros and writes brilliant stuff himself. His band, That Band, recently released its first CD and he's about to release his latest solo effort.

With such an A-list of writers, I began to worry that the others would feel intimidated. I needn't have worried, as it only whetted their appetite to show their own work. John Moore played us several songs that were very good indeed, and has a music ministry with his wife. Some of his songs had a very classical feel to them, with very strong melodies. Kathy Smith, the woman from Tilton, played us songs she'd written back in the 70's when she was still quite young. It was like peeking into someone's diary; very personal and very moving.

We started in the morning with a basic class, led by me, on music and composition. This made for a lot of give and take and made us all think about the process a little deeper. Lunch was provided by the Green House, and it was delicious! Thanks very much to Cheryl and Gary for the outstanding pizza. The roundtable was after lunch, and we had some good home cooking for supper.

The only unfortunate thing of the whole day was that nobody from town came for the pot luck supper. It seems we were up against a supper and concert at the Wentworth church. These things happen, I suppose, and I'm told it was a very good show. But by the time we were done with our evening meal we were all pretty worn out, so we opted out of our own show. This was sad, because we had held back Bob and Sue Moulton, and then nobody got to hear them play. We'll have to correct that sometime very soon.

All in all, we had a great time, made some new friends, learned some good stuff, and are hungry to repeat the event sometime in the future. Hopefully, we'll get the word out a little better and get a few more people involved. It was a good experiment, and worthy of repeating.

Romney? Really?

2011-10-23T15:31:00.002-03:00

Mitt Romney was accused in the news recently - I saw it in a guest editorial credited to the Concord Monitor in the Nashua Telegraph - of influencing Nevada's decision to change the date of their caucus to before the NH primary. Actually, 'members of his staff' are accused. The Romney campaign was allegedly contacted, and offered no comment so far.

I have heard it suggested that Romney, and the Republican leadership, would like to get the nominating process over with as soon as possible. Some say no, because a protracted battle keeps it in the headlines, and therefore on people's minds. This is possibly why Huckabee and McCain went down to the last gun fired in '08. But the party leadership never liked McCain anyway, so they didn't mind hanging him out to dry a little while anyway.

I believe they are clearly behind Romney, and want very badly for him to be the last man standing. He has consistently polled around 25%, usually between 20 and 30, since the '08 exit polls started handicapping the '12 race. They know his real support will never be more than that, and they fear like death anyone stepping out of the pack and getting the rest on their bandwagon. I don't honestly think they're worried about Cain, because he doesn't have the organization or experience to go the distance.

But if Bachman, or Perry, or Santorum start to get traction, they could blow the rest of the second tier out of the water. Anyone who coalesces the wandering 75% will run over Romney like a truck. At one of the debates, somebody - maybe even Romney - said that anyone on the stage would make a better president than Obama. I would take that a step further; anyone ELSE up there would make a better one than Romney. Well, maybe not Huntsman. He's Romney in a cheaper suit.

Let's face facts; is there anyone out there, anyone at all, who honestly believes that President Mitt Romney would actually change anything? The Republican party leadership knows it is, and always will be, the minority party, and they believe they can best hold power by holding the ship of state on a steady course. Just don't rock the boat. Obamacare? Well, yeah, it's bad, but it's there now. Nothing we can do . . . since we're willing to do nothing.

Barack Obama has learned the harsh lesson that George W. Bush learned; the best way to make enemies in politics is do something. That's the one thing I actually like about Obama; he's actually trying to do something. I think he's got a long-term vision for the country and he's busy every day trying to lock it in. Even he would rather see Mitt Romney than Bachman, Perry, Santorum, or Cain. They would actually, probably, do something, and then he'd have to start over.

Here's what I'm seeing through the haze; Romney wins, then dithers for four years trying to please everybody and winds up pleasing nobody. But he's the incumbent, so no Tea Party candidate can get the nomination. They'll raise one hell of a stink and get it all over Romney, but he'll be the nominee again. Obama comes back, gets nominated again, and goes on to his second term a la Grover Cleveland. At this point, unless a miracle happens, it looks like Romney's got the nomination. Then, unless unemployment somehow drops back to seven or eight percent, he's going to be President. And we're set up for The Resurrection in '16.

I have a suggestion; if Romney gets the nomination . . . let Obama win. Tea partiers, stay home on election day. Prove once and for all that the Republican party cannot win without us. I'm not saying I recommend this, but it's going to be in the back of my mind until things shake out.

Tea, Occupancy, and A Seat at the Table

2011-10-14T19:00:00.000-03:00

Been watching the whole political morass with great interest. Also been tempted a hundred times to say my peace here, but I'd probably be repeating myself. Things are heating up, though, so thought I'd throw down and see if it stuck.

I've been watching with some interest the coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York and elsewhere. I've also noticed a very basic similarity to the Tea Party movement, of which I consider myself a part. You have to look past the peripheral things, though. That includes most of the coverage. Media from both sides of the political spectrum paint the OWS people as left-wing Socialists; Fox News and Rush Limbaugh to djinn up fear, and NPR to rally their own. The same groups were painting all the Teabaggers as right-wingers, because they called for smaller government, lower taxes, and the Koch brothers were paying Sarah Palin big bucks to go talk to them.

But I think both movements go much deeper than this. I think the core was revealed on Fox News the other night when they were panning the OWS crowd. There were signs saying all kinds of different things, but the thing that caught my eye was a modified American flag, with corporate logos in place of the stars. To me, that said it all, and that flag could just as easily have been waved at a Tea Party rally.

From the right, the Democrats seem to bend the knee mostly to labor unions and minorities. From the left, the Republicans do the same to big business. And to a great extent, both views are correct. Not that there's anything wrong with labor unions, minorities, or big businesses. Most of us work for somebody else; labor unions made it possible for the average person to do that work for a fair wage; and advocacy for minorities has gone a long way toward leveling the playing field in the most diverse culture in history. These are all good things, and I don't think the average Democrat or Republican would disagree.

I can't help but think about how much things have changed in my own lifetime. I can remember state Governors standing in front of their constituents promising, "Segregation now, segregation forever!" I can also remember every three years or so the entire automobile industry being closed down by strikes, as well as airlines, etc. etc. etc. Unemployment was always 10% and was always going to be. Both sides won so many victories that all those things have changed.

So the Democrats present themselves as the party of minorities and the working man, but honestly, do their programs really mean progress for those groups? When the same things have stopped having results decades ago? Now, it's not about getting the worker a fair wage and benefits, it's about increasing Union membership. And the Union workers make far more than anybody else, and the industries that are heavily unionized are priced out of any hope of being able to compete. And as far as minorities go, the main argument seems to be whether or not illegal immigration is actually illegal or not. If you think it is, then you're a racist?

It seems that anyone who gets power gets right to work abusing it. Big business has re-written the Golden Rule to read; "He who has the gold makes the rules." Unions have themselves become big businesses. And if you're not a member of a minority, you're not supposed to have any rights at all. They prop up the government from both sides and hog all the seats at the table where the decisions are made.

That is the commonality between the Tea Party and those who Occupy Wall Street; they, WE, want a seat at the table. We want REAL solutions to all those problems, not just solutions that pad the advantages that a few already have. We don't want to fear and hate the other side, we want to help them. We want the Conservative Republicans to explain to the African-American and Hispanic communities how supply-side economics are advantageous to them, too. And the Liberal Democrats should explain to the CEOs how fairness and honesty would benefit their bottom line. It's actually true, you know.

It's not the government that needs to compromise as much as it is the Tea Partiers and the Wall Street Occupiers. We should all get together and recognize the common ground we share. Then, maybe, just maybe, we could get the politicians AND the media to shut the hell up and listen to US for a change.

Yes

2011-09-08T20:52:00.000-03:00

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now; Yes is my all-time favorite band. And it’s my blog, and I’m going to write a really long appreciation of them. And here it is. So thank you very much for your time, it’s been nice to see you, and I’ll write about something interesting real soon, I promise.

Are they gone?

Good. Not that I wanted them to leave, but I did want them to know what they were in for. The rest of us, the small little clutch of us, can now get down to some Yes.

Yes is the name of a British progressive-rock, or art-rock, band whose heyday was the 1970’s. They are, amazingly, still around. You don’t get to hear much about them these days. Classic-rock radio doesn’t play much of their stuff, except their one big hit single, 1984’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” But if you’re a fan of prog-rock, you know of them and either love them or hate them. Either way, they are the center of the Prog universe.

Yes, The Band

Vocals – Jon Anderson, Trevor Horne

Guitar – Peter Banks, Steve Howe, Trevor Rabin, Billy Sherwood

Keyboards – Tony Kaye, Rick Wakeman, Patrick Moraz, Geoff Downes, Igor Khorishov

Drums – Bill Bruford, Alan White

Bass – Chris Squire

In the now more than 40 years of the band’s existence, the two names always associated with the band are Jon Anderson and Chris Squire. Jon is on all but one album and Chris did not participate on the two released under the ABWH name. Other than that, the band has always included both of them.

Jon has one of those unique voices. He’s not a high tenor, he’s a soprano. He’s also the chief lyricist for the group, although the others all get their turns. Especially Squire. Trevor Horne was brought in for 1980’s “Drama” after Jon and Rick Wakeman left. He went on to be a top-flight producer.

“Drama” is also the one album that Geoff Downes plays on. He and Horne were The Buggles, now most famous for having the first video ever played on MTV; Video Killed the Radio Star. Kaye and Wakeman are the only keyboardists to each be on more than one Yes album. Moraz, Downes, and Khorishov got one each. Moraz went on to play for the Moody Blues in the ‘80’s and also has many solo works. Downes went with Howe in ’82 and formed Asia, and is still leading that band. Don’t know where Khorishov is.

Peter Banks played guitar on the first two albums, but Steve Howe is the man everybody thinks of as Yes’ guitar man. The band more or less broke up around ’80 or ’81. When it reformed, Trevor Rabin took over the guitar chores. Billy Sherwood co-produced their ’96 live set, “Keys to Ascension,” and because co-guitarist with Howe for two albums following.

Bill Bruford was the original drummer, and returned for ABWH. He is widely regarded as the superior of the two, but Alan White is no slouch. Bruford went on to play for King Crimson and do a number of solo and session projects. White is an alumnus of John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, and also recorded and performed with George Harrison.

That leaves Squire. He has a reputation as being a bit of a flake. He’s the guy who’s always late for rehearsals and sound checks. But he is also one of the most influential bassists in the history of rock music. He’s a virtuoso musician, a dynamic performer, and a very good songwriter.

Yes, Periodically

- The Beginning (1968-1969)

Yes (1968)

Time and a Word (1969)

(Anderson, Banks, Kaye, Squire, Bruford)

Their first two albums, and their most forgettable. From the early ‘70’s to the present day, the only song from these albums that ever gets played live is the second album’s title track. It’s a pretty little tune, but most of the rest is experiments that needed a lot of help, or attempted radio songs.

- Classic Yes (1970-1980)

The Yes Album (1970)

- minus Banks, plus Howe

Fragile (1971)

- minus Kaye, plus Wakeman

Close to the Edge (1972)

YesSongs (1973)

- minus Bruford, plus White

Tales of Topographic Oceans (1973)

Relayer (1974)

- minus Wakeman, plus Moraz

Going For the One (1977)

- minus Moraz, plus Wakeman

Tormato (1978)

Drama (1980)

- minus Anderson and Wakeman, plus Horne and Downes

This is the Yes that older fans remember. The music was experimental and bombastic. Steve Howe flew his guitar over the top of everything like a hummingbird on steroids. Wakeman ruled over the world of the recently invented synthesizer like Bach on acid, and if anything Moraz was even wilder. They were four virtuoso musicians playing their asses off all the time, all in support of Anderson’s keening vocals.

With no hit singles and little if any radio airplay they packed stadiums and sold millions of records. Their compositions became longer and more daring all the time. The album cover artwork of Roger Dean became iconic, and the Dean-designed logo was everywhere. The critics hated them as much as the fans loved them.

And then, with Tormato, they stumbled. The follow-up, recorded in Paris under the working title of “The Golden Age” fell apart completely and was never finished. Squire brought in the Buggles, and mixing some of Golden Age with some of what was supposed to be the next Buggles album, Drama was put together. The revamped band was well received in Britain, but the American tour not so much. After that, they called it quits.

- The In-Between Years (1981-1983)

Classic Yes (1981)

YesShows (1982)

It’s said that Squire put together Classic Yes, a compilation that even included songs from the first two albums, and YesShows, culled from live tapes that include performances by Moraz. Wakeman embarked on a solo career that he’d begun after Fragile. Howe did some solo albums, but his real highlight was being a founding member of Asia, which became very big indeed.

Squire also teamed up with White on an abortive project that came to be known as XYZ. The ex-Yes bassist and drummer did some sessions and rehearsals with Led Zeppelin’s guitarist and vocalist, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. This was after the breakup of that band following the death of drummer John Bonham. EX Yes and Zeppelin; get it?

The band all did their own solo albums between Relayer and Going For the One, and Anderson jumped headfirst into his new solo career. Besides recording under his own name, he teamed up with the man who was his alternative choice to Moraz for Relayer; a Greek keyboard virtuoso named Vangelis. There are a number of Jon And Vangelis albums out there, all very interesting.

- YesWest (1984-1994)

90215 (1984)

9012 Live (1985)

Big Generator (1987)

Talk (1994)

- all Anderson, Rabin, Kaye, Squire, White

Around 1983 Squire and White started working on a project they called Cinema with Trevor Rabin. Yes has always been quintessentially British, but Rabin was South African and Cinema’s base of operations was California. Squire suggested bringing in Tony Kaye to play keys, reuniting two of the original Yesmen. Kaye hardly played on the sessions, leaving most of the keyboard work to Rabin, but happily joined them on the road and cashed his checks.

The sessions were going well, but Rabin was doing most of the lead vocals and even he realized they needed someone better. Chris Squire made a cassette of the rough mixes and took them to Jon Anderson. Jon liked them and agreed to join the band, on one condition . . . that they change the name to Yes. He added some lyrics and re-recorded most of the lead vocals. The title came from the album’s Atlantic Records catalog number. The only number-1 single of the group’s career, “Owner of a Lonely Heart”, led it off.

- ABWH (1989-1991)

Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe (1989)

Union – (1991)

An Evening of Yes Music, Plus – (1994)

You will note the overlap in these two periods. At some point after Big Generator, somebody realized that there was a whole ‘nother band’s worth of ex-Yes people not playing Yes music. YesWest’s second studio album wasn’t received as well as its first and it also raised lingering tensions within the group. Anderson rang up Bruford, Wakeman and Howe and suggested they get together. Bruford allegedly only came on the condition that he receive equal credit without having to contribute any writing.

They were originally going to record and tour under the name Yes, but Squire sued, saying that he should own the name as he was the only member who’d been on every album. YesWest were horrified at the prospect of two Yes’s touring at the same time. The courts eventually ruled in favor of Anderson, essentially giving him ownership of the name.

Unfortunately for him, they had to deliver an album and book a tour faster than the courts could make their decision. So eschewing their long-standing relationship with Atlantic records, they signed with Arista as ABWH. The album and tour tickets sold well, actually outstripping those by YesWest’s Big Generator.

Further problems developed when both bands returned to the studio. It began to look like neither new album was going to be finished, so Anderson, who was singing on both, suggested they combine forces. The result was Union, with Yes swollen to 8 members. The album and subsequent tour were a big hit.

“An Evening” was released by Arista to fulfill ABWH’s contract obligations.

- The End (1995-Present)

Keys to Ascension, vol. 1 and 2 (1996)

- Anderson, Howe, Wakeman, Squire, White

Open Your Eyes (1997)

- Anderson, Howe, Sherwood, Squire, White

The Ladder (1999)

- Anderson, Howe, Sherwood, Khorishov, Squire, White

KeyStudio (2001)

- Anderson, Howe, Wakeman, Squire, White

Magnification (2002)

- Anderson, Howe, Squire, White

and various compilations, live albums, and boxed sets.

A-a-and . . . that’s about it. Yes left Atlantic after “Union” to sign with a succession of independent labels and haven’t made the album charts since. Their concerts still sell out, and most of their back catalogue is still in print, but they’re not a force any more. Plus, the members are all in their sixties now. Anderson and Wakeman have health issues that keep them from touring. The last trip of the classic lineup was in 2002, and they were great.

But Wakeman’s son, Oliver, took Dad’s place for the last trip to the states, and the leader of a British Yes tribute band took Anderson’s place. Even their website is suffering from neglect. It’s a shame that they’re just going to fade away, but there are worse things.

Yes, Categorically

The One – YesSongs

This is a live set from the tour in support of “Close To the Edge.” Bill Bruford quit the group between the recording sessions and the beginning of the tour, but still appears on a couple cuts. Alan White reportedly took the job on two days’ notice, and did a phenomenal job. It is a collection of excellent recordings of great performances of some of their best music. In most cases, better than the studio versions. If you’re going to have only one Yes album, this is the one.

The Important Ones –

The Yes Album – The one where Steve Howe joined. Peter Banks was forced out shortly after the sessions for “Time and a Word,” which upset a lot of the group’s fans. When they heard “The Yes Album,” they got over it real quick. Howe’s contributions to the songwriting are as striking as his guitar playing.

Fragile – Tony Kaye preferred organ and piano to synthesizers, which still had a lot of bugs and limitations. But the sounds were popular, and so he, too was forced out. His replacement was a former member of the Strawbs named Rick Wakeman. “Fragile” was as gigantic a leap as “The Yes Album” had been before it. Songs like “Roundabout” and “Heart of the Sunrise” are still great, but most striking were the little vignettes each member contributed. It’s like they were playing with their new toys, seeing what they could do with them.

Tales of Topographic Oceans – The first studio set with new drummer Alan White. Their compositions had been getting more and more sophisticated. With Topo, they took this to the extreme with four compositions each taking up a full album side, all turning on a central theme. The whole thing is based on an extended footnote from a Yoga book. Deep, baby, deep. This is the lynchpin of a sub-period known as The Topo Years, which ties together “Close to the Edge,” “Relayer,” and the song “Awaken” from “Going for the One.” Pilloried in the press, but at the time their best seller.

Going for the One – The return of Wakeman! It was a hugely hyped event, both as a recording and a tour. Nobody really disliked what Patrick Moraz brought to the group on “Relayer,” but Wakeman is an icon. He had fallen out with the rest of the band as much over lifestyle as music. Wakeman is a working class Brit into beef and beer, while the rest experimented with vegetarianism and drugs. He didn’t like Topo, and on that tour the rest of the band insisted on playing only the new album. So when it was over, he left. When Anderson played him rough demos of “Going,” he came back. Listen, and you’ll see why. The Squire-penned “Parallels” and Topo-inspired “Awaken” are highlights.

90125 – The first YesWest. The group was dead and gone, and then this! It came right at the peak of the ‘80’s hair-band craze, but still stood out from the pack. It sounded so different from any other Yes album, but still had Jon Anderson’s vocals on top. It was more sophisticated than anything Ratt or Poison or Def Leppard did, but tapped into that vibe. Rabin may have been a small step behind in the shred department, but had more imagination than any of his contemporaries. Their best selling album, and one of their best.

Union – The last Yes album to sell in significant numbers. A lot of serious Yes fans hate it now, but it’s really pretty good. If you know them, you can tell which songs were ABWH and which were YesWest. Even so, various players went to great lengths to play on the other group’s songs and it comes together pretty well. The tour also drew well, and there’s supposed to be a DVD that’s excellent. Now you know what to get me for Christmas.

The Other Best Albums –

Close to the Edge – The follow up to “Fragile,” this takes the promise of the former and explores it. The title track takes up all of one side, and the other side is two great tunes, “Siberian Khatru” and “And You And I.” Great stuff, and still one of my favorite albums. Anderson said at the time that the inspiration for the title track was a dream he’d had about carrying an amplifier in his arms through a forest and walking into a pool of quicksand. All three songs get excellent live treatments on “YesSongs.”

Relayer – This follows the same format as CTTE; long piece on one side (Gates of Delirium) and two shorter-but-still-long songs on the other. “Gates of Delirium” is based on Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” in case you were wondering. Patrick Moraz proves that Rick Wakeman isn’t the only person who could play synth like a sumbich. My favorite moment is a point about ¾ of the way through “Gates,” where they’ve been soloing, then stop and Alan White takes the beat onto the snare. He pounds away and drags the beat down, and then with no apparent cue the rest of the band jumps back in. Brilliant! Take that, Bill Bruford!

The Hidden Gems –

Drama – This album, and the accompanying tour, were not as well received in the US as in England. Plus, time has softened the hearts of many a Yes fan. It’s a really good album, even if it is one of their darker ones. Up to now, the group dynamic had been that Anderson always, eventually, got his way. That, and the virtuoso competition between Howe and Wakeman had driven the music. With them gone, Squire and Howe had the chance to assert themselves. Geoff Downes proved to be a brilliant musician, even though his style is much more subtle than Wakeman’s. And while no one, Horne included, believed the former Buggle to be the superior singer, Trevor Horne stepped up to the plate and gave it his best shot. He went on to produce 90125.

ABWH – It’s striking to listen to this back to back with its immediate predecessor, YesWest’s “Big Generator.” While Generator is a fine album in its own right, it sounds heavy and cumbersome next to ABWH. The latter is light and springy, with a wide dynamic range. It’s like comparing a bulldozer to a race car. Even the much-maligned “Teakbois,” a calypso-inspired Anderson song, gets you moving.

Talk – Proof that the bulldozer could really tear it up. The last YesWest album, almost as good – and in some ways, better – than 90125. This was the product of one really great idea and one really bad one. The great one was to give Trevor Rabin free rein to do pretty much whatever he wanted. He crafted a set of really good, inventive, imaginative songs. The bad idea was to leave Atlantic records and sign with a small, independent label. I don’t know if Atlantic dropped them or if they left on their own, but Talk became one of the best albums that nobody ever heard. After the commercial success of “Union” it’s a shame that this, so much better, got ignored.

The Ladder – The story of this begins with the reunion in 1996 of the Classic Yes lineup; Anderson, Squire, Howe, White, and Wakeman. They recorded the massive 4-CD “Keys Of Ascension” project in California with producer Billy Sherwood. Most of it was live, but there were also studio sessions. More on this later.

For whatever reason, they then bid Wakeman goodbye. Sherwood had already been working on a project with Squire and White, and they invited Anderson and Howe to help finish it up. That became “Open Your Eyes.” More on THAT later.

After this, with two guitarists and no regular keyboard man, they hired a young fellow named Igor Khorishov who had worked on the “OYE” studio sessions, making the band now a 6-piece. This group went into the studio with producer Bruce Fairbrother to record “The Ladder.”

The Worst –

(These are the albums you should wait to add to your collection until you have all the others.)

“Yes” and “Time and a Word” – The first two. I’ve only got the second one currently, and have only listened to it a couple times. The first one, I’ve heard a couple times as well. They’re all right, I suppose. To be honest, if you like Yes even the worst stuff is pretty darned good. With these two, there is the promise of things to come. Their songwriting and vocal harmonies improved dramatically in the following albums. And while Peter Banks is really a fine guitarist, I’m yet to hear anyone suggest that they should have kept him and not hired Steve Howe.

Tormato – Some very good songs on this follow-up to “Going For the One. Unfortunately, the relationship between Howe and Wakeman had devolved into them trying to one-up each other, and it hurt the songs. The middle break on “Release, Release” was so weak they felt they needed to dub in crowd noise to pump it up. And yet, the album contains pieces like “Onward” and “On the Silent Wings of Freedom.” It’s really a pretty good album, unless you compare it to all the rest.

KeyStudio – The 1996 sessions for Keys to Ascension were eventually released as two two-disc sets, mostly live and each ending with a few studio pieces. These were later put together on one disc called KeyStudio. It should be a masterpiece, seeing that it’s a reunion of the Classic Yes lineup. And, among most die-hard Yes fans, it is received as such. But it’s not. It’s funny how the same group of people can hate ABWH and love this lead turkey. This might be the worst album ever released under the Yes name.

Open Your Eyes – The follow-up to Keys, this might be the most controversial album in their entire catalog. Have you ever had one of those snacks that you didn’t really care for, but kept going back for? Yeah, it wasn’t bad, maybe I’ll have one more, and the next thing you know the bowl’s empty. This album is like that.

The engineer and co-producer of Keys was a California gentleman named Billy Sherwood. He hooked up with Chris Squire and Alan White for a side project named Conspiracy, much as Trevor Rabin had for Cinema more than a decade before. The feel of the whole album is leaden, even the quiet acoustic bits. And yet there are some good melodies and fine performances. It’s just that most of the good ideas wind up in songs that feel unfinished.

The most striking thing is how simple and dead Alan White’s drum parts are. It’s hard to believe the man who recorded “Gates of Delirium” on Relayer also played on this. There’s nothing for him to do, fer cryin’ out loud!

Most fans hate this record, because it compares so badly to the rest of the catalog. But a few love it, thinking it represented a bold new direction for the band.

Magnification – So far, this is the last Yes studio album, recorded in 2001. They were without a keyboard player at this time because Igor Khorishov insisted on misbehaving on the Ladder tour. So they hooked up with an arranger they knew and tried a new idea; integrating a symphony orchestra with a rock band. Yeah, I know, not exactly a new idea, but one that arguably had never been done really well. You can trace the roots all the way back to Phil Spector. The Moody Blues’ “Days of Futures Past” and Deep Purple’s “Concerto” are probably the best-known examples.

Yes wanted to see if the seams connecting the two could be made a little smoother. Musically, it actually works pretty well. The orchestra isn’t just playing what the keyboard player would have; they actually tried to create arrangements that combined all the instruments into one unit. The tour worked out pretty well also. The charts were sent to a number of symphony orchestras around the world, and then Yes rolled into town, did a rehearsal, and then the concert. It’s captured on DVD if you’re interested.

The biggest problem is that the album is kind of sleepy. Not heavy and cumbersome like “Open Your Eyes” or “Big Generator,” but just slow. There are a few great songs, but most of it is pretty forgettable.

And this is the note that they seem to be ending on. As mentioned before, Anderson and Wakeman’s health keeps them from touring with the band. Yes is on the road as I write this, but with Howe, Squire, and White supplemented by Benoit David on vocals and Rick Wakeman’s son, Oliver on keys. They’re also playing smaller and smaller venues. In 2002 they played the Whittemore Center in Durham. This time they’re at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, a hall about half as big.

Since “Magnification,” there have been a pile of live albums, DVDs, and compilations released. It’s as if they’re tying up all the loose ends before shutting off life support. There is creative output, but only as individual members. It’s like a well-skipped rock that goes and goes and goes, and will finally one day simply go ‘schlick’ and slip beneath the surface.

I’ve seen Yes live four times in all. The first was the day after my 22nd birthday, Aug. 14, 1977, at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, Maine. As you might have guessed, it was a memorable evening. They were touring in support of “Going For the One,” which I consider one of their two or three best albums. It's also the tour in which Rick Wakeman returned.

A year later I saw them again, this time at the old Boston Garden. “Tormato” tour. This was the tour when they started playing in the round. They had a rotating stage that revolved once every minute. The PA was suspended over the stage, and it is the only band that ever managed to sound good in Boston Garden. This iteration is captured on the DVD, “Philadelphia 1979.”

I also saw them in 1980 in Springfield, Mass. It was the Drama tour, with Trevor Horne and Geoff Downes filling in for Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman. Yeah, it wasn’t the same, but it was still damned good.

In 2002 my wife got me a ticket – one ticket; she wasn’t interested – to see them at the Whittemore Center. Wakeman had returned yet again, and there was talk of an album, but it’s never materialized. I went with no small bit of apprehension. We had seen the Moody Blues a couple years earlier, and while it was a very good show it was also obvious that the remaining members of the band couldn’t have done it without four or five ‘professional’ musicians supporting them.

This was not the case with Yes. There is something powerful about a band of excellent musicians at the top of their game. That power filled the hall that night. No compromises were made whatsoever. On the contrary, they breathed new life into songs that in some cases hadn’t been played live in twenty years or more. They even dug out “South Side of the Sky” from Fragile, which was impossible to perform live when it was new, and “Gates of Delirium” which Wakeman didn’t record. They played for over three hours, and it was a triumph.

I wished I had made the effort to take somebody with me. It was a glorious evening. I was struck by how many parents my age and younger were bringing their kids. They say it’s a bad sign when most of the cars in the parking lot are Volvos, but I didn’t care.

The most heart-breaking thing to me is how little respect they get outside of their own fan base these days. They are regarded as the worst offenders of an offensive era. In the ‘70’s there were hundreds of art-rock bands who dressed like Merlin the Magician and sang incomprehensible quasi-mystical words over complex music that probably owed more to Wagner and Beethoven than Bill Haley or the Beatles. If it hadn’t been for the success of YesWest, they’d probably be a trivia question now.

The fact remains that the words DID mean something, and the musicianship was without parallel in rock music. They, Yes and the others, pushed the envelope, and Yes’ music succeeded more than anybody else’s. And yet, in spite of their popularity and influence, they are not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They seem to be as despised and derided outside of their fan base as they are worshipped within it. To me, it is the Hall’s loss.

If you’ve gotten this far, you probably deserve even more punishment. Here’s a link to a very good bio of the band on allmusic.com.

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:difoxqr5ldfe~T1

It contradicts some of the things I’ve said, but it’s also got a couple of small inaccuracies. For instance, Jon Anderson doesn’t sing in falsetto. He doesn’t have to. His voice is really that high. Trevor Horne had to go falsetto a few times doing the older Yes material live, but he’s only human. Frankie Valli sings falsetto; Jon Anderson sings.

The Real Curse

2011-09-04T22:33:00.000-03:00

Generations of Red Sox fans speculated that there was a curse on their beloved baseball team. The source of this curse was supposed to be Babe Ruth, who pitched for the Red Sox in the first part of his major league career but was sold to the New York Yankees and as an outfielder and hitter kicked off the century-long dynasty the Bronx Bombers enjoy to this day.

But I think I have determined the true instrument of the curse, and Sox fans will be dismayed to learn that it is one of the most beloved figures ever to don the scarlet hose. To better understand my line of thought, I need for you to formulate in your mind a quick list of the greatest players in the history of baseball. Quick, jot down the names of the ten best players you can think of. Here’s mine, right off the top of my head in the heat of the moment:

Babe Ruth
Ty Cobb
Ted Williams
Joe DiMaggio
Mickey Mantle
Jackie Robinson
Willie Mays
Hank Aaron
Cy Young
Lou Gehrig
Stan Musial
Dizzy Dean

Okay, there’s twelve of the all-time greatest, done in less than a minute. There will be some obvious names I’ve left off, but I’d be willing to bet that many of these same names showed up on your list if you have any knowledge of the game’s history. Remember, I’m talking about all-time all-stars, greatest of the great.

That means, to be honest, that Red Sox players are few and far between on this list. Let’s be frank, now, as much as we may love Yaz, Rice, Clements, Boggs, do they really belong on a list with DiMaggio and Mays? On my list, I have two. And one of them, Cy Young, was a pitcher who played with a number of teams besides the Red Sox.

That leaves one. One that played his entire career for the BoSox. And that one happened to have been born in 1918, the last year Babe Ruth wore a Red Sox uniform. And who passed from this mortal coil in 2002, the year before the ownership of the team changed hands. Which, as we all know, led to their first World Championship since . . . what year was that? And shortly, their second.

So, I hate to say it, especially as much regard as I personally have for the gentleman in question, but it’s a possibility that this gentleman . . . could be . . . may have been . . . the embodiment of the very curse he spent his career trying to overcome. It’s as if the Red Sox weren’t allowed to have a World Championship during the lifetime of the only other man to ever wear a Red Sox uniform that could be ranked on the same level as the Babe.

Of course, this is the 21st century, and I’m a grown man, AND a Christian, and I just don’t believe in curses.

Right?

And if I did, I would note that that curse must also affect the New York Yankees, the ultimate nemesis in the most storied rivalry in the history of sport. It should be noted that the Yanks never won a championship before the acquired Babe – and before the Splendid Splinter was born – and it would stand to reason that they should never win another after Teddy Ballgame passed.

But in fact they did just that in 2010. Their 27th. And if Ted Williams was the lynchpin of the curse, then that shouldn’t have been possible.

Whew. It was all just a coincidence, then.

Right?

House of the Rising Sun

2011-08-13T23:42:00.000-03:00

I've been rediscovering a song that I have a big emotional attachment to. I've been away from it for quite a while, which is good, because I used to get terribly incensed whenever I heard The Animals' version of it.

I've talked to sources that insist the song comes from the 1890's, and was originally known as The Prostitute's Lament. Somebody told me once that it was written by Blind Lemon Jefferson, but that is unlikely. Apparently, the original author is lost in obscurity. The oldest recording of it I ever came across was on an old Best of Woody Guthrie record. The version was probably recorded in the '30's or '40's, and was about two and a half minutes long. To be honest, I don't remember much else about it.

The version that Eric Burdon (of The Animals, who gets erroneous credit for writing the song) heard was from Bob Dylan's first album. Dylan actually stole the arrangement from Dave Van Ronk, who was playing it in Greenwich Village and had planned on recording it himself until it showed up on Dylan's album. That version has eight verses. Burdon took the five he liked best, which brought it down to a better length for a single.

Burdon also changed the subject of the song from female to male. "And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy . . ." No, dammit, it wasn't. Many a boy with enough money for a good time came and went from the House of the Rising Sun, but it was poor girls for whom it was the ruination. Also, for your information, Frijid Pink did yet another arrangement of the song in 1969, that rocks the socks off the Animals' version in my humble opinion.

Here’s an interesting piece on the song from the BBC’s website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A12460772

Enjoy.

Simon and Garfunkel

2010-06-12T11:39:00.002-03:00

It has been my pleasure of late to re-enjoy one of the favorite acts of my youth. It kind of kicked off when a friend gave me a book of Paul Simon lyrics that they got on sale at a local Borders store. This got me digging around my CDs and cassettes, and I’m enjoying the heck out of it. Looking back, they had an amazing career and a substantial influence.

You must remember that we’re talking about an act that only put out five albums, and one of them never sold in significant numbers. They were signed by Columbia during what James Taylor refers to as the “Great Folk Scare.” This is the same folk movement, inspired by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, that gave us Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and like most movements a thousand pretenders that sank without a trace. Do a google search for Inman And Ira and see what I mean.

Anyway, Paul Simon and Arthur Garfunkel had a hit single back in high school, performing as Tom And Jerry. Simon went on to do a stint at the fabled Brill Building, along with people like Carole King. When folk music started showing up on television shows like Hootenanny and the folk-protest movement looked like it was going to displace rock ‘n’ roll, Paul got together with his old classmate in 1963 and recorded Wednesday Morning 3 AM.

But this proved not to be the path to stardom after all. Simon continued on performing and writing, but Garfunkel returned to suburban New York and got on with his life. Paul eventually pulled up stakes and moved to England where he tried to get his music career jump-started.

Fast forward to ’65 or ’66, where some enterprising Columbia A&R man took a track off the pair’s album and overdubbed a small rock band. The song was called Sounds Of Silence. Record company execs liked what they heard and released it as a single. Next thing they knew, an act they had released two years previously suddenly had the number one single in the land.

While the company was cobbling together an album from various Simon demos and bits of Wednesday Morning 3 AM, they talked the duo into coming back together and giving it another go. The Sounds Of Silence album ended up being one of the biggest records of Beatles-dominated 1966, and a pair of stars were born.

Part of the appeal of Simon and Garfunkel was that they embodied the intellectual, poetic vibe that made Bob Dylan so popular, but with a lot more musicality and considerably more mainstream attitude. They were the safe Dylan, so to speak. It was music aimed at a specific demographic; college students from New York City. This turned out to be something a lot of middle class kids aspired to in the mid 60’s.

The next album, Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme, brought this to the fore. It was the first opportunity since Wednesday Morning for Paul and Artie to craft some new music, and now they had a mandate and some money to work with. Enter producer Roy Halee, and the unit was complete. Listening back to it now, the album had some remarkable arrangements. Now in 2010 it’s hard to imagine a time when bass and drums were not obvious choices, but you won’t hear much of them on S&G albums.

Lyrically, Paul’s songs from this period come off as being a little pretentious. They show us a world right out of The Graduate. It’s for the sons and daughters of cocktail-sipping suburbanites who’ve sent their offspring to the finest schools to prepare them for more of the same. These offspring walk around in expensive coats and berets, books of poetry tucked under their arms. Some stanzas from “The Dangling Conversation” sum it up nicely:

And you read your Emily Dickinson
And I my Robert Frost
And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what we’ve lost

Ick. C’mon, Paul, get a real job, wouldja?

Yes, we speak of things that matter
With words that must be said
Can analysis be worthwhile?
Is the theater really dead?

And yet, it’s really a very pretty song that sticks with you even if the words sometimes seem just a little precious. One must remember that Paul Simon was probably one of the preeminent acoustic guitarists of the ‘60’s, and along with Roy Halee’s arrangements and production these albums sound great. Paul is also remarkably generous in giving Artie some great songs to be the lead singer on, including some of their biggest hits.

And, Paul was also aware of his own perspectives and wasn’t afraid to poke fun at himself. A great example of this is “A Simple Desultory Philippic,” which artfully skewers his own muse. It makes reference to everything going on around them in 1967. The whole album is swimming with cultural and now-historical references that really make the era come alive, up to and including the album’s final track, “Silent Night/7 O’clock News.” At the time it was chilling. Now, it’s a litany of names that anyone my age never thought they’d forget, and discover they had. References to Lenny Bruce and Richard Speck are joined with the eerily prophetic words of “Former Vice President Richard Nixon,” saying that the war in Vietnam could last “another five years.”

This album was followed in ’68 with Bookends. The album was recorded and mixed in between tours and other commitments, but it’s a clear leap forward from Parsley Sage etc. Paul’s songwriting was maturing quickly, especially in regards to his lyrics. Here’s some lines from “Punky’s Dilemma.”

Wish I was an english muffin
‘Bout to make the most out of a toaster
I’d ease myself down
Comin’ up brown

I don’t care, I love stuff like that. Songs like this and “Hazy Shade of Winter,” which the Bangles would later do an excellently rockin’ version of, were great. And he could still do the sensitive, beautiful stuff they were most famous for and that Artie’s voice was best suited for. The album may have been velcroed together piecemeal, but it’s still great.

They finished up their dual career with arguably their best work, Bridge Over Troubled Water. The title kind of said it all. Their friendship had really ended before Sounds of Silence, but there was money to be made and audiences to be wowed. Hearing yourself on the radio is pretty cool, too. Still, it was getting to the point that they couldn’t stand to be in the same room together. They decided to do one more album and call it a career. Both intended to continue on as solo acts.

Paul was again generous in giving Artie the lead on what would turn out to be their biggest hit ever, the album’s title track. If Garfunkel by himself was going to fail, he had no one to blame but himself because you couldn’t ask for a bigger gold star on your resume.

The album is startlingly good all these years later. Gone is the pretentiousness of Parsley Sage. Firmly in place are the brilliant Halee arrangements. A lot of it sounds damned odd to modern ears, but all of it sounds great. Even the slightly ragged flute duo doubling the vocal line on “El Condor Pasa” come off as haunting.

And the 1967 edition of Paul Simon would not have hesitated to write a tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright, but it would not have been as touching or beautiful as what the 1970 edition came up with. And as often happened with his best stuff, Art did a masterful job of singing the lead. Even the throwaway tunes like “Baby Driver” work.

Personally, the song I keep being impressed by on this album is “The Only Living Boy in New York.” This strikes me as the song that was missing from Bookends; the soft beautiful rambling little tune that would have made that whole album gel better. On this one, it tends to get lost. It’s also the one 40 years later that I come back to.

The penultimate tune was their tribute to their biggest influence; a live version of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love.” And just when you think they couldn’t follow that, Simon throws on another little gem called “Song for the Asking.” A little peck on the cheek on the way out the door.

Simon hit the ground running, doing a self-titled album that coughed up two hit singles. There Goes Rhymin’ Simon did the same. For his third solo album, 1977’s Still Crazy After All These Years, he teamed up for one song with Garfunkel. The song, “My Little Town,” was released simultaneously on both their solo albums. This was the only glimmer of light for Artie’s solo career. Around the same time they did a reunion tour, but no album came from it except for the live one following the tour. They have occasionally repeated the reunion, but basically they just don’t like each other. They only do it because of public pressure, and it’s the only way Art can get in front of a real audience.

And as of 1986, people have finally stopped asking Simon about reunions anyway. For all his success as a solo artist it was always the hanging question; when are you getting back together with Garfunkel? In ’86 he went to South Africa and did an album that came to be called Graceland. It was a landmark event in pop music and it proved once and for all that he simply doesn’t need Art Garfunkel. Graceland reinvented and redefined Paul Simon forever.

My brother, Rett, got to meet Art Garfunkel once. He said Art came across as self-absorbed and arrogant, convinced of the supremacy of his talent.

In between Tom And Jerry and Wednesday Morning 3 AM Paul wrote a song called “Red Rubber Ball” that was a hit for a group called the Cyrkle. The song sucks. It just shows that, even for Paul Simon, it’s possible to suck.

In the mid and late 60's, Simon and Garfunkel were part of a select group of acts that defined the era. They weren't as big at the time, or as influential in the long term, as the Beatles, Stones, and Dylan. But they did lead the second rank. They kept the flame burning that the Everly Bros lit for harmony duos, and stretched the envelope musically.

They are definitely worth a listen. I personally would recommend starting with the Greatest Hits collection released in the '70's. Not every song on it was a big hit, nor did Columbia use the original studio versions of every song. The versions they did pick are striking in their differences from the original, and the whole collection works on a level that most Best Ofs don't. They left off certain singles in favor of things like a live version of "For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her" that is so much better than the version on Parsley Sage. Even if you've got all five of the original S&G albums, this one is worth having. And if you don't have anything of theirs, then there's no better place to start.

The Greatest Guitar Player in the World

2010-01-30T10:04:00.006-04:00

A good friend of mine, Jim Ingraham of Thornton, NH was cleaning out his record collection. There were a ton of albums (you know, those big, black CD’s) that he wasn’t playing any more, and he knows that I collect, so he very graciously donated them to my ridiculously large library. So bit by bit I’m going through and playing them while I putter in my music room.

A lot of this stuff is early Contemporary Christian music from the ‘70’s. Quite frankly, a lot of it has more historical value than musical, and yet there’s a freshness and energy that sneaks through the questionable production values. They may not have had enough money or skill to sound like Zeppelin or Tull or James Taylor, but they believed what they were singing.

I put on a record by a group called Love Song and set to work doing something, probably changing the strings on a guitar. I was letting the music be a background noise, not really listening to it. The singer sang, and than a guitar solo came in. I stopped dead in my tracks. The sound was so distinctive, it could only be one person. Out of the fog of concentration it had reached in and grabbed me. I picked up the album cover and scanned the credits, and sure enough . . .

Phil Keaggy.

There’s a story – apocryphal, but a great and widely told story none the less – about an appearance by Jimi Hendrix on the Dick Cavett show. At one point Cavett asked him what it’s like to be the greatest guitar player in the world.

"I don’t know," Hendrix is supposed to have said. "Ask Phil Keaggy."

Hendrix called the tune that everybody playing a solid-body electric guitar in the 1970’s had to march to. Either you embraced him and tried your best to sound like him, or you ran screaming in the opposite direction and tried your best to NOT sound like him. Either way, there he was planted firmly in the middle of every note on the neck.

Hendrix had re-written the book on electric guitar and amplification. Love him or hate him, he had a distinctive sound that influenced absolutely everybody in the field of rock. Personally, I think Carlos Santana put it best; Jimi’s music was "wider" than anyone else’s.

One of the few that managed to distinguish himself outside the pack was a young Ohio native named Phil Keaggy. He came from the same music scene that over the years gave us Joe Walsh, Alan Freed, The Pretenders and Devo. He lost two fingers at the tender age of four in an accident on the family farm, but it didn’t keep him from being a prodigy on the guitar. He stands five feet, four inches and at certain times his singing voice sounds remarkably like Paul McCartney’s.

He came to the public’s attention when he was still in his teens. The band he was fronting, Glass Harp, got signed and he dove head-first into the rock-star lifestyle. He was on the road and high on drugs when he learned that his parents had been killed in a car accident. It caused him to re-examine his life, and before long he became a Christian.

Glass Harp was getting ready to record its second album, and there’s a lot of talk about how the band ended. Some say that there was tension over Phil’s new lifestyle and message. Some say it was just everybody wanting to expand beyond the three-piece group’s inherent restrictions. Whatever the cause, after their third album they broke up.

From 1973 through the ‘80’s Phil’s music could best be described as Fusion/Jazz with vocals. The one exception was "Master And The Musician," his first all-instrumental album and still among his most highly regarded. His albums have never sold particularly well, but he did a lot of session work and had connections with most of the Contemporary Christian musicians of the day.

One album I would highly recommend from this era is a live set he recorded in 1977 with Second Chapter of Acts called "How the West was One." They were doing a West-coast tour, y’see. It’s a very well recorded example of his pristine mid-70’s sound. The live version of his classic, "Time" is not to be missed.

A pattern soon developed around Phil and his music. In Contemporary Christian music (also known as CCM) a big hit of the day would sell maybe 100,000 copies. Much less than that, and your contract didn’t get renewed. It’s a very unforgiving genre, but purely by necessity. After all, Christians have bills to pay, too, and there were no Michael Jacksons or U2’s to make big bucks for them. So every album had to sell well.

Phil’s did not, so it wasn’t long before his label dropped him. Another quickly picked him up along with the back catalogue, simply because of the prestige of having CCM’s only bonefide Guitar Hero. Fortunately for him, his concerts always drew well and that’s probably where he’s made most of his living. But as time has gone by, the back catalogue has gotten heavier and his albums >sigh<>

The big change came at the end of the ‘80’s with the release of "Sunday’s Child." He had done the fusion thing to death and was every serious guitarist’s secret vice; the bible thumper who burned the strings. But his audience was getting smaller and smaller and he was staring down the barrel of yet another dropped record company option. Sorry, Phil, we can’t afford you.

At any rate, he went into the studio and did something he hadn’t done for a long time; a rock and roll record. It was so good, so much fun, that it took repeated listenings to notice that there were hardly any guitar solos on it. Nobody minds, though, because it was his best album in years and still stands as one of his best ever. After that he dove headfirst back into the rock music he grew up with.

Recommended Listening:

What A Day (1973) – His first solo album, and still great after all these years.

Emerging (1977) – The Phil Keaggy Band, featuring keyboardist Phil Madeira. A great album, and it shows just how far from the Hendrix norm of the ‘70’s Phil went. Good songs, good recording. Its predecessor, "Love Broke Thru," had great songs but Buck Herring’s production made it sound stiff and flat. "Emerging" is much better.

Master and the Musician (1978) – You have to put this on, because even Phil refers to it. His first instrumental record. It was the sort of thing your label gave you permission to do, back in the day. It is really good.

Town to Town (1981) – This is much better than the record that followed it, "Play Thru Me." The differences between them are subtle. The former holds up better over time. Some of the songs on the latter are just a little twee. Town to Town just feels more relaxed, more natural. Especially good are the songs, "Full Circle" and the title track. Also really good is his rendition of the old hymn, "Rise Up, O Men of God."

Getting Closer (1985) – After "Play Thru Me," he got dropped by his label; Sparrow, I think. Phil wandered in the wilderness for a couple years, living off live shows and plugging away in his home studio. This period is captured in the album, "Underground, Volume 1." It’s got some very good tunes, but sounds very homemade. When he got signed again, his reply was "Getting Closer," and it’s a triumph. Energetic, great tunes, excellent production values, and best of all a guitar tour de force.

Way Back Home (1988) – An all-acoustic album, with themes reaching back to his childhood. A re-release on CD years later had most of the lead vocals re-recorded, which I thought was pointless. The original version I have on cassette is better. The CD also includes an extra piece that I suppose for total Phil devotees is interesting, but for my money breaks up the musical vibe too much. It’s snippets of an audio recording of a Keaggy family gathering, with Phil noodling on guitar recorded over it.

Sunday’s Child (1989) – There’s not enough one can say about this album. As I mentioned before, it’s the one that changed everything. This was Phil’s liberation. Not that the jazzy stuff wasn’t great, but this one feels more fun than anything he’s done before or since. Cameos by Russ Taff and Randy Stonehill and a couple of really good Mark Heard songs actually up the ante.

Find Me in These Fields (1990) – And his very next album was, in my humble opinion, even better. Just as much fun, but painted with a broader brush. Phil Madeira, the keyboard player from Emerging, and John Sfarzo, Glass Harp’s drummer, made appearances on this one.

Crimson and Blue (1995) – This was sort of Phil’s last shot at rock stardom. His record company at the time made a big push with this one, and even prepared three different versions of the album. Crimson and Blue itself was aimed at the CCM audience. Another version, Blue, had some different tunes and remixes of some others and was directed toward the secular world. Yet another offshoot, Revelator, was released as a special treat to the Phil fans. The original is the best, trust me.

Phil Keaggy (1998) – This one is more acoustic, and very Irish-influenced, and it’s great.

He has also done a number of instrumental albums, most of which find their audience in the New Age Music genre. There are also instrumental things like the hard rockin’ "220." If you’re a guitar player, file it with your Satch and Vai CDs.

I have seen Phil live, hmm, lessee, four times in all. The last time was around 1991 or ‘2 or so with my wife. He and Randy Stonehill were sharing the bill in support of Sunday’s Child and Find Me In These Fields and he kicked butt. They both did, actually. Lynn went to see Stonehill and I, of course, was there for Keaggy, and we both came away impressed with the other’s performer. Phil ran his guitars through a rack as tall has he is and from there into a Vox AC30.

Before that I saw him at Gordon-Conwell College in Mass, sharing a bill with Brian Duncan. Duncan was good, but the room and their sound system made him sound muddy. For some reason, Phil’s sound was much better, especially the vocals. Maybe I’m just prejudiced. This was around ’86 or ’87, in support of Getting Closer.

I also saw him at the Creation festival in Pennsylvania around 1987. Good show but kind of overshadowed by the whole festival atmosphere. He was one of the smaller acts on the bill, so he played in the afternoon.

The first time I saw him was in 1984 at California Christian Center in Sacramento, Ca. Four-piece band with a second guitarist. It was a good show, but funny in a way. You could tell it had been a long tour; they all looked tired. Phil came out and burned the frets for three songs to get the guitar players in the room excited. Then, he and the band shifted gears and we did some serious worship. Phenomenal show!

I was there with the friend who led me to Christ, Rick Nixon. We stayed until after so he could try and talk to Phil. We hung back while all the guitar players grilled him for about half an hour with the same babble of questions I’m sure he’s put up with for years; what kind of strings do you use, how high’s your action, what are those pickups, what guitar did you use on this song . . . It was endless and he looked very tired, but was very patient and kind.

As a sidebar, this is one of the things I like about Christian concerts. The artists generally take time at the end of the show to mingle with the crowd.

Anyway, Rick and I finally got our turn. Rick explained that the Lord had put on his heart that he should pray for Olivia Newton-John. Phil had recently done some magazine ads with Randy Stonehill and the British singer, Cliff Richard. Cliff had done a movie with O N-J. Rick asked Phil (are you still with me?) if Cliff had ever mentioned Olivia’s spiritual state of mind.

Phil took this in patiently, then gave us a look like he was waiting for the punchline. Then he realized that this young man was actually concerned about Olivia Newton-John’s salvation. He smiled, and said he was sorry but the subject never came up, but I think he was touched that Rick chose to ask that question of him. It was a nice moment, and I can tell you that Phil Keaggy is an honestly nice man.

The thing that, above all else, makes him worthy of the title I gave him up top is not just his skill. Lots of people have skill. It's his versatility. Over the years he has absorbed elements from an increasingly diverse universe of the guitar. You can hear snatches of Allan Holdsworth, Andres Segovia, Michael Hedges, and many others. And yet, he is distinctly, identifiably, Phil. Nobody sounds like Phil, and he can play any kind of music.

I don’t know if he’s actually got a record deal at this time, but he still records and performs prolifically. He also freely jumps back and forth between differing styles; vocal, instrumental, electric, acoustic, retro, post-modern, and anything else that tickles his fancy. The last few years he’s also been into looping, which uses multiple layers of delay to create compositions. He’s also presided over the reformed Glass Harp, which has released new music. For more information, and corrections of the things I got wrong, click on the title.

Open Letter to a Rich Person

2009-10-26T10:19:00.002-03:00

Hi. There’s been a lot of talk about you lately. President Obama has decided that you’re being paid too much, and he is – or members of his administration, at least, are – cutting your pay. It may be up to 90%. And the scary part, from your perspective at least, is that most people seem to be all for it. Even people who are against it for moral/political reasons think you deserve it.

You may count me among them. The one thing that I think will make it stick is that it’s going to happen to rich guys whose companies took stimulus money. That gives the lender some say in things like that, like it or not. They can do it to Chrysler, but they can’t do it to Ford.

Your stockholders should have already done it, but they dropped the ball just like they did when they hired you to lead the company. If you’d done a job worthy of a big bonus, they wouldn’t be in the trouble they’re in now. I have no sympathy for you whatsoever. Consider yourself lucky that you have a job.

Why is this attitude so pervasive in American society? I’ll tell you, simply and succinctly; it’s because you’re an asshole. Think about that next time you go out to a restaurant, or the grocery store, or get gas for your BMW. Listen to the words that come out of your mouth to the people who serve you, get you things, hand you your change, ask you for more detail regarding what you want, and then smile and say, "Thank you, have a nice day."

Day after day I have had you and people like you look me in the eye and call me stupid, or say something that shows you think I’m stupid, in spite of my education and experience. I know my job, and I hope I’m not guilty of sinful pride when I say I’m pretty darned good at it. When you come up and spout gibberish and I don’t leap into action, it’s your fault. Your explanation of what you want makes no sense to me. When I come back with questions that you have to actually think about, it’s because I want to give you what you want and I’m trying to figure out what that is. Coming back with the same gibberish, only louder, does not expedite the process.

You seem to forget that you need us, and we don’t need you. You ought to carry that thought around for a while. Your ability to be an asshole with no negative repercussions relates directly to the amount of money you have, and nothing more. You don’t seem to realize that your attitude toward the people that feed you, clothe you, and get you things to amuse you is reprehensible. Try to imagine what your life would be like if you woke up one morning and your bank account was empty. Your job was gone. The things you own are being repossessed. By 10 in the morning, you’re standing beside the road with the clothes on your back. And the rest of us are going about our business with no more cares than the night before. We don’t need you.

We grow the food. We pick it. We transport it to places where people will buy it. We build the store it’s sold in, and the truck that brought it. We clear the land it’s built on. And if you and your kind were to vanish tomorrow morning, we’d manage without you. We were growing, traveling, and building long before there were any banks or corporations.

But what about you? If we were all to disappear, who would bring you your latte? Who would make it? Who would harvest the coffee beans and milk the cow? Who would feed the cow?

None of us, really, doubt that you work hard. Or that you serve a useful purpose in society. We all have bank accounts, and take out loans, and we like the fact that if we buy a Chevy in Idaho we can easily get parts for it in Georgia. It’s people like you, managing these large organizations and their interaction, that make these things possible. You make and distribute the movies and music and TV shows we enjoy. You excel at the games we’ve invented, and it’s entertaining to watch you do it. We take significant amounts of our income and freely spend them to enjoy the fruits of your labors, and don’t begrudge you a dime as long as we get what we’re paying for. After all, we’ve got families to feed and bills to pay, and we hate getting ripped off as much as you do.

So when you come into the places we work so hard in and act like we’re ripping YOU off, we don’t like it. We’re not, usually, and your contempt is unjustified. You should behave better, and you should certainly teach your kids to. Have you ever seen them in line for food at a ski area? Have you heard the things they say to the people providing them sustenance? If my kids behaved that way, I’d discipline them.

Or do you even know your kids? Do you spend time with them, or do you shunt them off to schools and then in the summer shunt them off to camps? Do you send them postcards from the places you go, with two gushy sentences about how much you love them, while they deal with surrogate parents paid to amuse them for a month or two? Is that how you were raised? No wonder you’re an asshole.

Why not consider this; you’re in a Dunkin’ Donuts, or a Post Office, or a Mercedes-Benz dealership, or the place you store your boat, or a lift line at Loon Mountain. You need something. You come to a person who makes his living by getting you breakfast, or shipping your package, or making sure you don’t break your neck getting on the chair lift. Already, today, that person has served dozens, maybe even hundreds, of other people successfully. They’ve been doing it for a while, and they’re probably going to be doing it for a while longer. Maybe years. Maybe for life.
Try this; be nice. Smile at them. Thank them. Act, for two seconds, as if you appreciate their efforts, and maybe even care about them. Wish them well. Yeah, I know, you don’t care, but try and appear like you do. Just for two seconds. Believe me, they will remember you. They will mention it to others. It will give them a lift. It will even make them want to do their jobs better. And if it doesn’t appear to do that, it’s because so many people like you have been so harsh to them for so long, they’ve tuned it all out. So do it again. Don’t be pushy, just be nice. Keep it up, and it will eventually rehumanize them.

And, just maybe, it will rehumanize you, too.

And as for your pay, just suck it up. Those of us who make your life possible and get low to mid five figures for doing it would trade with you in a heartbeat.

A Few Thoughts on Health Care Reform

2009-09-12T09:33:00.003-03:00

>sigh<

Okay, I can’t resist. Here goes.

Two big problems with the health care system in this country. 1) It’s expensive. 2) Not everybody has access to it.

1) Expensive

Watched my retired parents deal with the first problem. Medicine is expensive, and so are doctors. On the surface, it appears that putting both under control of the federal government completely solves the problem. The government sets the price. Every doctor and nurse in the country is now a federal employee, and Uncle Sam now owns the pharmaceutical companies.

1a) Expensive: Postal solution

We’re still on problem one, right? Expensive? Okay, there’s two ways to deal with that. Always two ways. >sigh< One is to make the health care system like the Postal System, my current employer. I’ve been with the company for 21 years, and have had a good close-up view of how it works from the inside.

The US Postal System is going through a very rough patch right now, as with the downturn in the economy and changes in the way people do things, we’re losing a ton of money. There is pressure from every side on this company right now. Our customers want us to keep our prices down and continue to provide the same service as before, or better. Each post office is under pressure from management to increase revenue and reduce costs.

There are some things that the USPS could do that would help, but we can’t get them done. For instance, we could close a bunch of small, unprofitable post offices that one could argue aren’t needed because they’re close to bigger, more profitable ones. But they’ve been there for a hundred years, and their handful of customers complain to their representatives in Congress and Congress says no, you can’t close them. Or, we could consolidate certain parts of the company and let employees go, but they’re represented by Unions, which complain to the politicians, and no, you can’t let them go.

So let’s say instead of a local Postmaster, I’m now the local Healthmaster, running a small clinic in a small town. The people in the town wish I was better equipped and staffed, because I can’t do things like appendectomies or other surgical procedures. The US Health System won’t give me the money I would need to have an operating room and keep a surgeon on staff, because there aren’t enough people in my area to pay for it. He’d be playing solitaire all day because there’d only be two or three surgeries to perform every week, and the OR would collect dust. As would the surgeon’s skills.

So I get promoted, and instead of running a level 13 clinic I now run a level 18 hospital in a larger town. They’ve got OR’s and surgeons, but they work like slaves because all these people from the small outlying towns have to come here to get anything besides Band-Aids and flu shots. And word just came down the pipeline from HQ that the cost-of-living increases we were expecting have been postponed for another two years because the economy’s taken a bad turn and an election year’s coming up.

That pipeline, which comes from District Management, says that I have to trim my expenses, because more budget cuts are on the way. Oh, and there’s been more complaints that people in my area are being told they have to wait because there’s a line ahead of them waiting to see their doctor, and can we speed things up a little bit? And no, you can’t have more doctors because you’re not budgeted for them and besides it’s harder to get them because no one wants to go to medical school any more because the local mailman makes more than a doctor these days.

1b) Expensive: the Military Option

The military is a former employee of mine, so I’ve got a little insight into its workings as well. In my case, the US Navy. The other way to manage a federal health care system would be to do it like that. Hand it a blank check and give it anything it needs. So now I’m no longer the local Healthmaster, I’m Major Clogston, Commanding Officer of the local clinic.

Sitting here thinking about it, there’s a lot to be said for this method. The Captain of an aircraft carrier doesn’t think about the price of gas when planes are shooting down the flight deck, burning enough jet fuel to light Seattle. Neither does the commander of that tank brigade. People complain about the Pentagon’s budget, but by gosh when you need them you’re glad you’ve got the best.

But the US Health Corps’ budget would dwarf the Pentagon’s. The US Armed Forces together have about 210,000 active duty officers. There are approximately 1.5 million physicians in the United States. And then there’s all the nurses, and paramedics, and EMTs, and janitors, and office staff, and kitchen help, and pharmacists, just like the Army has enlisted men.

But the blank-check caution-to-the-wind method is the only way you’ll get doctors and pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment companies to continue to develop and produce at the levels they do now. Let’s face facts; countries that have single-payer health care systems come to us for drugs and medical equipment, and their doctors come here to work because they can make money. If you have figures that show otherwise, please put them in the comments sections of this blog.

And if you’re thinking that the military option is actually good, then I need to tell you something. When I was in the Navy, the striking thing that I will always remember about it was how much got stolen. We would have a working party unloading a truck full of food, and by the end of the day I would estimate a good third of it walked back off the ship, or went into somebody’s locker. And that happened with everything. Need a pair of pliers? A new toilet seat for your home? You name it, the base or ship or whatever has got piles of them lying around.

In my observation, I would guess that the people who work there steal a good portion of our military budget. The same thing would happen to a government-run health care system.

2) Access

I’m totally tired of all the hyperbole over how many people don’t have health insurance. If you show up at an emergency room, they have to take care of you. It’s the law. Then they send you a bill. That’s business. But you still get waited on, whether or not you ever pay it. I think everyone who thinks that health care should be free should immediately apply for medical school.

I agree with the people who say, whatever insurance system Congress and the President come up with should apply to them as well.

I would have less of a problem with what they call the public option if it were administered by the states instead of the federal government. There are a lot of advantages to state-level government programs, as I have discussed in other articles on this blog. Read them.

This brings us to Medicaid. Yes, there’s a lot about it that’s broken. So fix it! Here’s a link to a good article about Medicaid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid

You improve Medicaid, you’ve solved the access problem.

3) Bullshit

That’s the biggest problem with the whole debate. There’s so much being said about reform that you can’t actually find out what the facts are. There’s 1100 or so pages of legislation floating around that nobody gets to see, or apparently can understand. Who writes this stuff?

Here’s an FYI fer ya. An insurance company is not a health care provider. It is an investment firm. Most of their profits come not from the premiums their customers pay, but from the investments they make with them. It’s like a bank. They don’t pay their staff and their light bill out of the deposits. Hell, they pay interest to the depositors! Then they invest the money on deposit.

But the government does not invest the money it gets from taxpayers. Whatever money the government pays to doctors and hospitals, it has to get it all from us. The next time a politician says they can do public option health insurance without increasing the deficit, you will know what a liar looks like.

And both sides are guilty. The people who owe their livelihoods to the current system are pulling out all the stops to fight the President’s reforms. Nothing breaks the back of a family’s finances quicker than a health issue. Have a heart attack, or get cancer, and you’re poor. There actually is an outcry for reform.

Unfortunately, the reforms being offered are all politically motivated. Special interest groups like insurance companies, AARP, drug companies and such are driving the debate for their own benefit. Left-leaning ideologues are trying to wrestle control away from corporations, but without thinking through what will happen when they do. They talk about tearing down an edifice of greed, but that same edifice serves millions of people. What will they replace it with?

The basis of what I’m trying to say is this; let’s not break the parts that work. You’ve got a better idea for a health care system? Fine. Start a company and sell subscriptions to it. Compete with the current options in the public market place. My suggestion for the government is to revamp and upgrade Medicaid. You come up with a way to have cheap doctors and drugs with no loss in quality, sign me up.

And for that matter, taking better care of yourself will go a long way in that department.

I’ll shut up now.

Matt Smart

2009-08-02T22:37:00.002-03:00

I had the privilege of seeing the latest evolution of one of the finest musicians in New England the other night. It was at a benefit party/concert at King's Lumber's airfield in Wentworth, NH. Bob King and his partner, whose name I've sadly forgotten, played, and then me, and it finished up with Matt Smart's band. Bob and his friend were very good, and the audience was very kind to me, thank you very much. The benefit was for the Warren/Wentworth Ambulance Service.

The first time I met Matt he was about 19 and already sounded like Stevie Ray Vaughn. I don't mean just played the notes, I mean he did it with real soul. That was probably ten years ago, and he's done nothing but improve since.

He hung around with me and the band I was in for a while, back when Chris Sweeney and I were playing as The Flexibles. He liked the variety of music we did, but he's always been primarily a modern blues man. Last night I saw a more mature artist, but one who is still stretching out. He's left the SRV clone behind and is working more from a modern Southern Rock stance, channelling Duane Allman and Steve Gaines from latter Skynyrd.

He started the night on a Les Paul, but quickly switched to a Telecaster, which he's clearly more comfortable with. He's also taken the step of being this band's lead singer, and he's not bad. Al Boucher played great drums, and I believe the bass player's name was Fish, and he was very good as well. Plus, Bob King joined them on second guitar, but I don't think he's a regular member of the group.

As far as rock guitar goes, the only serious competition to Matt is Mike Bottigio of Cobalt Blue, and Mike's got about twenty years on Matt. Mike is simply incredible; a Hendrix disciple but with his own distinct voice. That is something that Matt doesn't have quite yet, but it's coming. He's an incredible player, but he hasn't hit that Carlos Santana/Phil Keaggy identifiability yet.

And yes, I know there are guitarists out there who have a lot more technique than Matt, Mike, or any other rock and roller. But if rock and roll is your music, these are the guys that everyone else in New England has to answer to. And dat's de name o' dat tune.

Filling Out Forms

2009-05-31T20:08:00.002-03:00

There are many musical forms, although you might not be aware of that if your knowledge is limited to modern popular music. Oh, yeah, all kinds of forms.

The basic song form that is commonly used now is pretty flexible, which is probably why it’s so popular. You start out with a piece of a song. A verse, a chorus, maybe four lines, maybe eight, however it comes together. Aerosmith’s regular formula is to start with a chorus. Steven Tyler says that if you’ve got a good hook, you can write a song around it. It’s the same method that Merle Travis, the great Country picker, liked to use. He would take one line and write the chorus backward from that line, making it the final one. Then he came up with verses that led to that chorus.

AC-DC has simplified the process even more. Since the death of Bon Scott, the standard AC-DC song takes the title and repeats it four times. There’s your chorus. Some of Bon’s tunes used to be a little more free form, but the Brian Johnson era has been their most successful by a long ways.

There are four basic elements of music; melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre. Those are all part of even a line from a song. You put together a group of lines, you have a verse or whatever. What you do with the lines, and the groups of lines, becomes the form.

Let’s say you’ve got a verse. Let’s write one, right now, all right?

Oh, baby
I love you
‘Deed I do
Really do

Whew! Look out, Lennon and McCartney! All right, there’s a verse. Let’s call that A. I don’t know what music you hear in your head for that, but let’s say it’s sixteen bars long. In the key of C, so the piano players can do it without any black keys. So it’s four bars of C, four bars of F, four of G, and back to C for the final four. Now, let’s do a second verse.

Oh, honey
Glad you’re mine
All the time
Dipped in slime.

We’re in a hurry, here. Same chord progression. Now we haven’t discussed a melody, tempo, instrumentation, or any of that. We have the basic rhythmic structure and the harmony, and that’s it. But that’s enough to show how a basic song is written. So we have pattern A, then we repeat it. A A. Now we need a chorus.

Baby honey mine
Guess that makes me yours
Gee, that’s really fine
Going? Shut the doors.

Keeping up? Okay then. Change the chord progression around a bit. Two bars of F, four of C, two of G, and repeat. That keeps it the same length as the verse, although it’s not necessary. But an important factor is that it ends on the V (five) chord, which leads back into the next verse. Oh, yes, there’s another verse. So let’s call this chorus the B section.

Right now, we have three parts to our song; A, A, B. Oh, all right, let’s just repeat the first verse and stick it at the end. Some great songs were done that way. Check out your hymnbook next time you’re at church. Of course, the sky’s the limit. We could do a lot more. Chorus again, then another verse, or write a third section and have that be the bridge. That would be C.

Let’s take a quick look at a popular, highly regarded song; Hey Jude, by the Beatles. It’s laid out like this:

Verse
Verse
Chorus
Verse
Chorus
Bridge, which is that na-na-na-nananana part.

Or, A A B A B C.

This is basically how songs get written. Sometimes it’s that mathematical, by people who know how it’s done. Sometimes it’s practically by accident, by people who get lucky. The standard song form is so ubiquitous now, it’s pretty easy for even an unschooled amateur to at least know if he’s done it right.

Let me give you an example. You’ve given a kid a ream of paper and told them they can draw anything they like. Sky’s the limit. So they grab a pencil and begin. They start off with pictures of family, pets, things they know. They put away the pencil and get crayons, colored pencils, water colors, oil paints, pastels, and so on. They move on to pictures from their imaginations, which could be things that don’t even exist or have any conscious meaning.

You would think that this kind of freedom, with this much access to materials, that the kid would be able to reach to the heights of artistic accomplishment. And yet, when you gather the pictures all together, you suddenly realize that they’re all 8 ½ by 11 inches and have a white background. All 500 of them.

It’s kind of like listening to the radio. Song after song, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, one after the other. Switch from classic rock to country to easy listening to alternative and on and on. Different styles, themes, sounds, but in basic ways all the same; all 2 to 4 minutes long, constructed from verses, choruses, and bridges.

This century has been an interesting one from a musical standpoint. On the one hand, every time you turn around there are different sounds available and they’re put together in different combinations. An orchestra of instruments has been divided, recompiled, reconfigured and added to with yet whole new orchestras of instruments. To the strings, horns, and percussions of old were added electronic synthesizers and differing systems of amplification and recording, as well as effect treatments.

And yet for all this experimentation with tone and timbre, with rhythm, harmony, and melody, the basic form of composition has settled into what can only be called a deep rut. A perfect example of this is the band "Primus," which has certainly stretched the sonic boundaries of what can be done with guitar, bass, and drums. And yet, most of their pieces are still verse, chorus, and maybe bridge constructions of three to five minutes.

It’s like having a fenced-in yard in which you keep a dog. The dog changes shape until it’s a caribou, a tiger, a gerbil, or a sperm whale, and yet the size of the yard never changes. And it still can’t break free. So now that you’ve seen the fence, here are some listening recommendations that might help you find a way out of the confines of 20th-century song form.

U2

These guys hit popular music back in 1980 as if they just stepped off the mothership from another world. They wrote and played like they were just inventing music themselves. Drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. was the only trained musician in the group, and none of them knew how to write songs. They used this to their advantage and simply did what sounded best to them. I think it’s telling that Bono, upon accepting the Grammy award for Song of the Year for "Beautiful Day" laughed because the song had no hook. Check out their first album, "Boy," or middle period stuff like "Unforgettable Fire" and "Joshua Tree."

Frank Zappa

I could make a long list of rock songwriters who play around outside the norm, but nobody did it better than Frank. He considered himself more jazz than rock, and jazz has never really been comfortable claiming him either. He was actually more of a disciple of avant-garde composers like Edgar Varese and Aaron Schoenburg than any popular songwriters. The difference between Frank and his inspirations was that Varese, Schoenburg and their ilk made music that is all but unlistenable. They had to explain the intellectual basis for their music to get anyone to listen to it. Zappa, on the other hand, took the same intellectual groundings and made exciting, interesting, and sometimes even danceable records with it. His crude sense of humor was what tended to attract people’s attention, but the music was incredible. He made over fifty albums, and just about all of them are amazing, but some are rather difficult to stomach unless you’re really into toilet humor. I recommend "One Size Fits All," "Roxy and Elsewhere," "Freak Out," and "The Yellow Shark" for starters.

Progressive Rock

In the seventies there were a lot of bands that added synths and maybe a violin or a flute to standard rock and roll and called it progressive. Then, there were the real ones that rose above the pretenders. Groups like Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Hawkwind, Nektar, Gentle Giant, and on and on. Extended composition was the order of the day, and album-length compositions were the coin of the realm. Plus, people came out of these bands after they broke up and stretched even further, usually in obscurity but the stuff is out there. Here are some of my favorite mind-stretchers:

Yes – "Close to the Edge"
ELP – "Tarkus"
Genesis – "Foxtrot"
Gentle Giant – "Power and the Glory"
Todd Rundgren – "Utopia"
Jethro Tull – "Thick as a Brick"

That’ll keep you busy for a while.

Jam Bands

As much as I dislike the Grateful Dead and Phish, the movement that grew in their wake has some pretty cool stuff. As a young songwriter, I was captivated by the notion that music moved in a linear fashion, but visual art like painting and sculpture was outside the boundaries of time. I contemplated the idea of music that could exist outside these boundaries. Then one day I realized that jam bands did this all the time. A good jam tune really had no beginning or end, just an endlessly revolving middle. Recordings do not really do this music justice, but even so I would direct you toward the work of Duane-era Allman Brothers like "Eat a Peach" and "Live at the Fillmore" for this genre at its best. Most good jam bands occupy a loosely-knot left field between country and blues. Just google "Bonaroo" for good links.

Jazz

That’s an awfully big area to cover. For our purposes today, look to Duke Ellington, especially "The Great London Concert" and his later bebop-influenced stuff. Also Miles Davis, who never stayed in one place too long. There’s also modern Free Jazz to consider. One particular album I would recommend for its sonic bravery is one from 1973 by guitarist John Abercrombie and keyboardist Jan Hammer, called "Timeless." It’s named that because they shied away from even using time signatures. Just about anywhere you go in Jazz, you’re going to find something interesting. Jazz was, and should still be, about breaking boundaries.

Classical

This is where the boundaries came from in the first place, in Western music anyway. The chromatic scale and the written language of music came from here. You would be hard pressed to find modern standard song form here at all! The deeper you get into the classics, the more inspiration there is to find. And many of these ideas have not even been scratched for use by a rock band. Just think of it; a whole palette of idea, just waiting for electric guitars and drums.

Film Score

Some of the most imaginative music of the twentieth century is used for background music in movies. Wanna get your socks knocked off? Put in a DVD of "Singing In The Rain" starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds. Find the scene called "Broadway Melody." Now, close your eyes and ignore what’s happening on the screen. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then, I give up.

I can’t begin to tell you how many movies have good music in them. Most, really, to be honest, and hardly any of them just string together pop songs. You want to get really amazed? Then check out old Warner Brothers cartoons. I’ve got a CD of this music, composed by Carl Stalling, and it’s nothing short of brilliant. A songwriter or musician should listen to this and wonder how anyone could think of it.

So here’s hoping you find in this the inspiration to look beyond the three-minute song.

FDR And The Difference - part 1

2009-03-19T09:20:00.001-03:00

This is the first of two, or maybe three, pieces intended to give a little perspective on the current economic downturn and the stimulus package.

One thing that keeps coming up is the comparison between the current situation and the great depression. I’m sorry, I should have capitalized that; The Great Depression. It makes me wonder if one day this will have a cool name that we capitalize. The comparison, of course, is ridiculous. But who knows? It’s young yet. I’m sure they didn’t come up with The Great Depression the same afternoon the stock market crashed, while brokers were still hurling themselves out of windows. It probably took a while to catch on.

This is where I have a little bit of an advantage. I, you see, am 53 years old. What that means is, while I personally missed TGD (The Great Depression), my parents had vivid memories of it. They grew up in it, and it colored everything they did for the rest of their lives. So when people go on about how bad it is, I agree that it’s not good, but don’t start comparing yet.

As I write this, in March 2009, unemployment is at roughly 8%. When I got out of the Navy in 1976, it was over 10% nationally and had been for some time. It also stayed that way for, well, basically into the second or third year of the first Reagan administration. And nobody was really sweating it, or comparing it to TGD. That would have been, thank you very much, ridiculous. Yes, it sucked. Yes, it took me six months, SIX MONTHS to get a decent job.

But during TGD, unemployment averaged 25%. That’s not two-point-five, that’s twenty-five. One in four people in the whole country were out of work. For ten years. And when it started, there was no Social Security, no Medicaid, no Medicare, none of that. People were losing everything they had, and getting put out on the street, and starving to death. Literally starving to death.

That is why people of my parents’ generation credit Franklin Delano Roosevelt with saving the country. New Deal programs like the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and NRA (National Relief Administration) put people to work when nobody else could. It quite literally saved the lives of millions of people.

It’s good to remember what kind of times TGD happened in. One of the results of the First World War was the overthrow of the Russian government by the Bolsheviks. There was a lot of fear in this, and other, countries that Communists were planning a revolution. The United States was an emerging world power, and Socialism was an exciting new idea that was making its way from theory to practice.

America responded by swinging hard right, leaving behind the idealism of Woodrow Wilson for the "normalcy" of Harding and Coolidge. Herbert Hoover was a hero during and after the war for leading the relief efforts that saved millions in Europe. He went on to be Harding and Coolidge’s Commerce secretary and rode that wave all the way into the White House. The Twenties were a boom time and government was very friendly with big business. It was Calvin Coolidge who said, "The business of America is business." The early days of the Hoover administration were a resounding "Amen."

And then, eight months in, came the crash. The government battened down the hatches and hoped that business would solve its own problems. It didn’t. Things got worse, recession became depression, and times were tough. Real tough. Soup kitchen tough. Riots in the street tough. A tent city sprang up on the National Mall in Washington, and it was dubbed "Hooverville."
Hoover actually began many of the programs that Roosevelt later got credit for, but it really took Roosevelt to get things turning around. The whole point of these programs was to give people a way to survive until the economy came back on line. Believe it or not, if you read what Roosevelt had to say on the subject, it was never intended for these relief programs to become permanent fixtures. More on this later, in another piece.

There were also a number of regulations that limited business practices that helped cause the crash. One of these regulations was the Glass-Steagall act, which separated commercial banks from investment banks. It was the repeal of this act in 1999, by the Republican congress and approved by the Clinton administration, that is one of the keys of our current crisis.

My folks were actually pretty lucky. Their families lived in the country. They had chickens, pigs, a cow or two, and a garden. My grandfathers were loggers, and everybody ate and stayed warm. Basically, if you could pay your mortgage and buy flour, you could live. In the cities, it was different. I’ve heard stories of kids who would steal a piece of fruit from the grocer on the corner, and the grocer never did anything about it because he knew it may have been the only thing they had to eat that day.

As the depression wore on there was a growing unrest centering in the cities of America. People who were scratching every day for that day’s food and shelter watched as Lenin was replaced by Stalin and the Weimar Republic gave way to Hitler. Hoover was a hero in 1928, but if he had won the election of 1932 he may have been the last President of the United States.

The cold truth that too few Conservatives are willing to face is that mankind is a fallen race. Businessmen, for all they do to keep the engine of capitalism humming along, are human beings too. They fall prey to the temptations of money and power, and strive to gather more of both to themselves even when it’s to the detriment of their fellow man. If you make it possible for them to gamble with other people’s money, more times than not they will. Business needs to be regulated by the government, at least to a certain extent.

The cold truth that too few Liberals are willing to face is that mankind is a fallen race. Politicians, no matter how idealistic they are when they start on the road of public life, are human beings too. They fall prey to the temptations of money and power, and strive to gather more of both to themselves even when it’s to the detriment of their fellow man. If you make it possible for them to take the power to make decisions and take risks out of the hands of creative, hard working individuals, they will. Government needs to be limited and decentralized, at least to a certain extent.

If these two sides of the coin, these two edges of the sword, are not kept in a careful balance, things go all out of whack. This country had tipped too far in one direction, and is now in the process of tipping too far in the other. But as bad as it is right now, it doesn’t begin to compare to the Great Depression. For that matter, it’s not even as bad as the period between Nixon and Reagan. So please, the next time somebody says this is the worst time since TGD, do yourself and everyone else a favor.

Laugh.

Government Regulation

2009-02-14T23:30:00.002-04:00

Whew! Y’know, it takes a lot of stones to use filthy language like that, especially in the title. I might as well have called it &%#%, or @#%&, or even &*#^%$. Especially when I reveal that it’s about government regulations . . . that I approve of.

A lot of what this comes down to is some of the surprising differences between liberals and conservatives. Especially within the context of the dominant spiritual beliefs on both sides.

For instance, it is the liberals, driven by Eastern and New Age philosophies, that are the greatest advocates of the poor and downtrodden. It was they who argued AGAINST regulations that would have kept banks from offering the kind of loans, the adjustable rate loans that go from way-low interest to way-high, that got us into the trouble we’re in now.

Their reasoning was that it would allow people to buy houses that might not otherwise be able to. Ever. And we should encourage everybody to do everything they’re capable of. Because Humankind is basically good, and left to its own devices will always, in the end, do the best possible things. This is the thinking that gave us the civil rights movement, and railed against the war in Vietnam when all the Vietnamese wanted was to try a different economic model than we used. One that, on paper, looked a lot like the book of Acts, chapter 2. What could be more spiritual than socialism, where everyone was equal and all shared from a common pot?

This political philosophy says that marriage is an old-fashioned idea. That education based on learning by rote memorization is cruel and unusual punishment. That there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality. After all, it feels good, doesn’t it? And abortion? Why, it’s the simplest form of birth control. Go ahead and have all the sex you want, with anyone you please, and if something unpleasant happens, a little local anesthetic and a snip and you’re free again. Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Unless, of course, you’re rich. Or white. Or a Christian. Or, for that matter, male. In fact, sometimes simply being an American is bad. These are the belief systems and behavioral patterns that need to be restricted and regulated. These things are harmful, and need to be discouraged. Their narrow-minded adherents need to be persecuted and silenced. A strange thing for people to do that stand up for the persecuted and offer a voice for the downtrodden.

And then we have the conservative. In this country, conservative philosophy centers around tried and true Judeo-Christian ethics. Hard work, fidelity and honesty are rewarded. All forms of sin are discouraged. And to those who work hard and are creative, the rewards can be great. If you make a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Go ahead, drive a Mercedes, or ride in the back of a Rolls, or fly on a G5. You’ve earned it. And, it puts a lot of other people to work. Success makes you worthy of all the rewards you can enjoy, and all the power you can grasp.

Except that the same Holy Bible that tells us, if a man shall not work, neither shall he eat, tells us that no one is without sin, no, not one. Humankind is inherently corrupt. Human nature is base, and left to its own devices is drawn to sin. It is only by force of will and the grace of God that we can ever be truly worth anything, or do anything good.

So it shouldn’t really be a big surprise when the wealthy businessman or powerful politician abuses their privileges. When they manipulate the markets for their own gain. When they engineer the collapse of others’ fortunes to add to their own. When they conspire to make shoddy products and inflate the price. When they put their profits and their power above the good of their neighbor, or their nation.

It is the reason that no rich person ever seems to be truly happy. In their glory, they look down on the rest of us, and actively belittle those who serve them. And inside is the gnawing truth that, without all that money, they’re no different from the meanest, the lowest. They dread losing that money, and they know that another rich person would snatch it all away from them if they could.

And that is the failing of conservatism in this country. It resists using the power of government to restrict the activities of people who have no other restrictions put on them, save their own conscience. And that proves, too often, to be too weak a power.

When taken to its furthest extremes, both liberalism and conservatism can be taken too far. Liberalism can find its fullest expression in communism, which is totalitarian. Conservatism winds up as fascism, which is also totalitarian. And both can also lead in the other direction, to libertarianism and from there to anarchy. Human nature requires the rule of law for its own survival and growth. And yet, the writers and enforcers of that law are themselves human. Too much law is as bad as too little.

Some restrictions are necessary, as the banking crisis has shown us. I have a suggestion for government regulations that I think would have good effect.

One thing that cries out for regulation is the automobile. With oil being in the hands of robber barons, the less of it we use, the better. And, let’s face it, pollution is bad. I don’t know if air pollution causes global warming or not, and I don’t care. The simple fact is, it can’t be good to shovel tons of soot into the atmosphere. Anybody who advocates buying SUVs just to spite the Democrats should have their pool peed in. Let’s see what they think about a little pollution then.

Cars, and pickups and SUVs and minivans, should all be strictly regulated in regard to safety, fuel mileage and emissions. These things will lead to good results. The main reason for not doing it is that it would keep the cost of manufacturing and development lower, but these developments should be done. And the American public regularly shows that it prefers to buy big pickups to small cars, so the pickups, etc. should be included in the regulations. Is a Ford F150 that gets 15 mpg really that much better than one that gets 40?

I’ve seen in my lifetime how much cars can improve when they have to change to meet restrictions like these. Yes, I have fond memories of Boss Mustangs and Hemicudas, but a 2009 Toyota is safer and cheaper to operate, and you can even get them that go like a bat out of hell.
And if you regulate things like fuel efficiency, emissions, and safety, it relieves the companies of the temptation to beat their competitor’s prices by ignoring those things. Everybody has to meet the same marks, so quality and availability become the things that make your product stand out.

The trouble with too many liberals is that they cannot afford to acknowledge the significant progress that has already been made regarding things like air and water pollution. I once saw a pair of photographs that told quite a story all by themselves. It was two pictures of the Los Angeles skyline, taken from roughly the same location offshore in the Pacific Ocean. One was taken in the early 1960’s, the second in 1988. In the early one, all you could see was a cloud of smog with a couple tops of buildings rising out of it, and blue sky above. In the second, you could clearly see the city, even though there was a faint gray haze around it.

The automobile of today puts out less than 5% of the harmful emissions of its 1950’s counterpart. But when was the last time you heard a liberal thank the auto industry for this? No, and you won’t any time soon, either.

Just today (Feb. 14, 2009) I heard a fellow on the radio (NPR, of course) bemoaning the fact that the stimulus package that just passed through congress is too SMALL, because they took out some of the environmental spending.

"If an asteroid were heading for the Earth," he said, "and were going to strike in ten years, it would be the biggest story in the media." Every news outlet would be talking to every scientist they could find, and the urgency to destroy or turn the asteroid would be regarded as the most important thing for our government to spend money on. Why then is our impending doom from climate change so roundly ignored?

Because we’ve heard it all before. When I was in high school back in the early ‘70’s they told us that in ten years you wouldn’t be able to go outside without a wide-brimmed hat because of the destruction of the ozone layer. Well, guess what? Forty years on, the story this guy told smells of bovine excrement. The world likely will not come to an end in ten years unless an asteroid hits it, or the Lord brings his judgement on us. Or Al Gore smites us with his rod and staff. But intelligent regulation on the automobile industry is long overdue, for the good of all.

Local Phenomenon

2009-01-30T06:23:00.001-04:00

The other day I was in a record store. Strike that; there is no such thing any more. CD store, I suppose, although they’re getting fairly rare. Anyway, this one was in Tilton at the Tanger Outlet. Music For A Song, it’s called. I was browsing through the CDs and came across a stack of discs by Jim Tyrrell. He’s a local artist, and I’m proud to say a good friend of mine.

It was really great to see Jim’s face looking up at me out of a rack of CDs. I don’t know if he’ll ever be seen anywhere else, but he certainly deserves to be. Very talented musician and songwriter, and I highly recommend that you get yourself a copy of his disc at your nearest record store . . . or whatever they’re called nowadays. There’s even a link to his blog right over there, no not there, yeah, right . . . right THERE.

There’s two reasons his CD is on sale at Music For A Song. One is that Jim is very talented. The other is that he’s driven. I think he still harbors dreams of one day being a big star. Not only can he play, sing, and write, but he works very hard on his craft. And even if he never gets to sell his CDs anywhere else, you can bet you’re going to get a quality product.

For myself, at the ripe old age of 53, I’m no longer worried about hitting the big time. That ship has sailed. No worries. Hey, at this point if I did get offered a record contract I couldn’t afford to take it. No way could I quit my job and go on the road. You know what the odds are of a new artist breaking through and having a hit? They’re astronomical. For every Dave Matthews, or Michael Jackson, or Hannah Montana, there’s a hundred – maybe a thousand – people that somebody thought was worthy of a record contract that sell three or four hundred copies and disappear without a trace.

That doesn’t stop me, though. I just flat love to write and play, and I’m going to keep right on doing it. And I know plenty of other very talented people who keep doing it, too. Here are some of them.

http://www.myspace.com/cobaltbluevt will get you to the myspace page of the best damned blues band in New England, Cobalt Blue. These guys rock. I’ve seen them as a 3-piece and a 5-piece. I also have their CD, which is excellent, and I mean that. I have a number of CDs and cassettes by friends and acquaintances that I never listen to. Sorry, but a lot of that kind of thing simply isn’t that good. Sometimes there are good reasons that somebody doesn’t get signed, y’know. But Cobalt Blue’s CD is on my player regularly.

The whole band is great, but the guy that most impresses me is the guitarist, Mike Bottiggi. He’s a graduate of the Hendrix/SRV school, but takes it to his own place. He also is a tube amp rebuilder/fixer/toaster who’s got the tone that comes right out of the ground and straight up your spine. You cannot listen to this guy and not be moved. They are based in Northern Vermont, and are worth travelling for.

http://www.abandcalledspike.com/?mpf=frame is for A Band Called Spike. If you like your rock hard, this is the place to go. What would you call this stuff? Punk metal? That’s probably pretty close. To tell you the truth, I don’t listen to a lot of this kind of music, but they do it very well. Jim Alger, the band’s guitarist and vocalist, is a very old friend of mine, but even that wouldn’t get him mentioned here. The reason I’m mentioning him and them is that they’re very, very good. The other day I put in the live DVD I have of them, and it’s great. Even though I don’t make this variety of music my first choice, they are compelling. They’re based in Massachusetts.

A good musician needs a good instrument, right? If you’re a guitarist, like I am, you owe it to yourself to check out Green Mountain Guitars at http://www.greenmountainguitars.com/index1.html. Glen DeRusha makes some of the best acoustic guitars I’ve ever played, and it is my goal to one day own one. Check out some of his craftsmanship at this site. Or better yet, get yourself over to Bradford, Vermont and see them first hand. Believe it or not, Glen loves to have people drop by and play his instruments, or even just hang around and talk guitars and music. He even lets me do it! What a guy!

Billions, trillions, and 1932

2009-01-10T01:30:00.001-04:00

What is a house worth? That’s one of the primary questions facing the United States of America on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Obama.

We’ve already set aside something in the neighborhood of seven hundred billion dollars to bail out the banking industry. $700,000,000.00. Just what is so industrious about a bank, anyway? Isn’t an industry something that makes something? Anyway, the reason the banks got in so much trouble was the bursting of the housing bubble.

What the bubble was full of was the hopes of an awful lot of people. They stupidly accepted a con. Some bank – and that term has become very, very loose – convinced them to sign for a loan on a house. The interest rate was low for the first, oh, say, three years or so. Then, it went through the roof. It said so right there on the paper. Hell, it said so on the TV commercials. I would watch those commercials and think to myself, "Who on God’s green earth would be stupid enough to sign up for one of those rip-offs?" Now we know.

So they defaulted on the loans. By the thousands, they defaulted. Red ink flowed like the Black Sea. And there sit the houses. What are they worth now? That really is the question, isn’t it?
Somebody buys a house. After three years and the adjustable rate adjusts, they can’t afford it any more. They default. But the house isn’t gone. It’s right there. Somebody owns it. And whoever owns it wants to sell it. Maybe they won’t get ten cents on the dollar, but they’ll sell it.

Let’s say the house went for a hundred thousand dollars. $100,000.00. Based on the neighborhood and the going rate for houses like it, that was the price. You sign a loan, and in the next thirty years you may actually have to pay nearly twice that, but the house is worth a hundred grand. Until you can’t make the payments. The bank takes it back, puts it on the market. After a few months, they’re willing to take 75 thousand. Then sixty. Then fifty. Sounds like they’d have been better off letting you refinance.

The whole 700 trillion figure is written on the air anyway. Think about this; you’re a real estate speculator. You own ten pieces of property, each worth a hundred grand. You’re worth a million dollars. But if you can’t get your price, you’re not worth that much. So if AIG, Bear-Stearns, etc. can’t get their price for all those houses, they aren’t worth as much as their stock says they are. And the price of the stock goes down. Crash.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the houses. Same house. Maybe even same people living in them. But if they’re worth less on the market, the value of the bank goes down.
So what? It’s not really an industry, remember? They don’t build the houses, they just own them. If a bank is worth ten billion because it owns ten thousand houses, and the price of the houses goes down, they’re worth less. They base their expenditures on the worth of the company. Everything from office supplies to the number of employees . . . to the bonuses of the top executives.

So now let’s say you’ve got a bank that’s worth ten billion, run by a CEO that is contracted to receive ten million. When it’s 1%, it doesn’t sound like much. When it’s suddenly 5%, and you’re laying off tellers and bookkeepers, it begins to look like a lot of money. And believe you me, the banks that will be getting the bailout money pay their CEOs a lot more than that. And now they won’t be getting that money from the sale of houses. They will get it from us.

I think I’m beginning to understand what a Republican must have felt like in 1932. A new President is about to take office and he’s talking about a stimulus package. A big one. One that will dwarf the TARP fund of 700 large. Oh, we’ve got to do it, just gotta!!!! Everybody says so. Everybody says, in fact, that the paltry 850 billion, that’s Billion with a B, isn’t enough!!!!!

I, the conservative taxpayer that I am, have my hand firmly clamped on my wallet. It won’t do me any good, but it’s all I can do. I listen to the talk about teacher training and bridge construction and road repairs and I know that these are all the government handing itself my money. They take it from me, and you, and pass it around amongst themselves and we’re supposed to be grateful that when they’re tired and need to go home they buy their groceries in the private sector.

The thing is, I am the child of people who grew up during the Great Depression. I’ve not only read the history books, I’ve heard the stories of people who lived through the real thing. This is exactly how FDR brought us out of the GD, and he really did. Rush Limbaugh can kiss my ass, because FDR really did save the country.

But it’s not 1932. The day Herbert Hoover handed over the key to the executive washroom, unemployment was over 25%. That means one in four workers wasn’t.

The depression lasted through the thirties right into World War 2. Wars are expensive, so that brought the economy back. There was a recession following the war, but in the 50’s and early 60’s everything boomed. Then toward the end of the Johnson administration we slipped back into a recession that lasted through the 70’s. The year I got out of the Navy, which was 1976, unemployment was over 10%. The last year before the 1980 election the Gross National Product rose 0.3%.

It took until 1982 for things to start turning around. So when someone talks about the Reagan Recession of 81-82, it was really the Johnson/Nixon/Ford/Carter recession. Reagan ended it.
The bank bailout will ensure that nothing in the bank business will really change. The Obama stimulus package will ensure that we’re still in recession in 2012. Take it . . . to the bank.

Blind Joe Death and the soft white underbelly

2008-12-20T21:44:00.004-04:00

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In the early 1960's, solo acoustic guitar instrumentals meant one of two things; classical music, or Chet Atkins. That is, until John Fahey arrived.

He began his performance and recording career just in time for what James Taylor refers to as "the great folk scare." He would show up for a gig and start playing. Soon, people in the audience began to wonder when he would sing. He never did, right up to his death a few years ago at the age of 61.

He referred to his music as "American primitive." He wasn't very flashy, but he had a great sense of melody. He used mostly open tunings and would noodle around on a melody. If he came out now it's doubtful that he'd have gotten very far, but at the time he was unique. The style of play came from folk and Peidmont blues, mostly.

As far as his personality goes . . . have you ever seen the show, "House?" Well, think of Dr. House with a guitar. Oh, wait, he already does that. There you go, then. It's been reported that sometimes Fahey would go on stage and say nothing for the whole show. Just play, song to song, and then get up and walk out. Other times, he would stop halfway and go into a long diatribe, often racist and cruel. He would enrage audiences. An A&R guy from one of his record labels said that he was the only artist he ever handled whose record sales actually decreased after he'd visited a town.

He owned his own label for a good part of his career. When he started, no record company would sign him, so he started his own; Takoma. The logo included a description of the company being hidden on the "soft white underbelly of the music industry." In the beginning he sold his records out of the trunk of his car. He rarely sold more than two or three hundred copies, so he'd quickly go back into the studio and record some more.

As was appropriate for the strange, inverted world of John Fahey, his label's biggest success was also its downfall. And, its downfall was his biggest success. Oddly enough for someone as antisocial as Fahey, he mentored a number of like-minded musicians. One of these was a hot young guitarist from Minnesota named Leo Kottke. He played acoustic guitar with all the flash that Fahey lacked. Takoma put out his first album, entitled "6 and 12 string guitar."

By Takoma standards, it was a runaway hit. Fahey soon found himself confronted with thousands of orders for the album. He went to the company that pressed his records and placed the order. Which he had to pay for. Eventually, the initial rush of sales ended and all the stores he'd sent records to began to send back the unsold copies. Which he had to give refunds for. The record wound up costing more than the company made from it.

Kottke went on to sign with other record labels and has an ongoing recording career today. Fahey wound up selling his back catalogue to Fantasy records, which keeps him in print today. He had undoubtably sold more through Fantasy than he ever did on his own, and they have been faithful to keep the sound quality and the insane liner notes.

During lean times Fahey fell back on his record collection. Being widely travelled he picked up tons of old records at yard sales, antique shops, second-hand stores and the like. He was an afficianado of old blues, country, and other folk records. When money was tight he tapped into his closely-guarded network of fellow collectors and sold off large chunks of his stash. His love of old blues records led to his most persistant creation, a mythical bluesman who was given credit for most of his early work named Blind Joe Death.

Blind Joe and the topic of death itself were constants in his ever-evolving music. His later work used his growing interest in sound collage, while staying instrumental and centering around the acoustic guitar. When he died, a lot of his fans in the music industry came out of the woodwork to praise him. It's surprising how influential he turned out to be, affecting everything from folk guitar to Seattle punk.

I could easily recommend any of his albums, most of which are still available. If I were going to pick one, it would be the best-selling records he was ever on, which was a sampler that Takoma put out shortly before its demise. It featured Fahey, along with cuts by fellow American Primitives Leo Kottke and Peter Lang. It was some of Kottke's earliest recordings, dating from before "6 and 12 string." To my ear, the real stand-out performances were the four cuts by Peter Lang, who I understand has re-started his music career after a couple of decades out of the spotlight. And the Fahey cuts were particularly good, too.

John Fahey made the world safe for folk guitar. He was not a genius player or composer, but he was creative and bold, and sometimes that plenty. He opened the door through which such diverse artists as Leo Kottke, Will Ackerman, Michael Hedges, Tommy Emmanuel, and Kaki King have strode through. And even after all the evolution that those artists represent in solo acoustic guitar, you can put on an old Fahey album today and it sounds good. That's not something that can be said of every groundbreaking artist.

The Greenhouse

2008-11-14T23:33:00.002-04:00

Last Friday night, 11/7/08, got a chance to play right here in my own 'hood at the Greenhouse restaurant. I can literally see it from where I'm sitting right now.

I occasionally go to their Thursday open mic night, which is run by a very good friend named Sky King. The Greenhouse is one of those places that has changed hands several times. Last year it was The Twig; before that, the Garlic Clove, and when we first moved to Warren 9 years ago it was Paramount Pizza. The Twig went whole hog into live music, and the Greenhouse has been getting into it as well. But it's a small place with a small budget.

The Open Mic works out well for them. If you're on the list, you get your first drink free, which is a good deal imho. The list fills up quickly, and the place stays packed until closing time. It's also one of the better open mics around; not so much because of the quality of the players, but just the atmosphere. You can tell that most of the people that play there only play in their own living room, but it's that love for the music that permeates everything.

Most places, you go to their open mic, you get to see a lot of people who are trying to get a group happening. And that means it's mostly people who aren't quite good enough to be in a working band. Which isn't necessarily bad, but the sad ones are the ones who think they're really good, and they really aren't. And everybody in the room knows it, except for them.

Hanging out on Thursday night at the Greenhouse is just flat-out fun. You haven't lived until you've sung "Good Night, Irene" with Sky. Anyway, I went there to play one evening and the owner came up and said that she'd love to have me come do a Friday night, but she couldn't afford me. It was very flattering, I must say. I assured her that she could afford me just fine. After all, it's a hundred yards from home! And, I love to play.

So we did the handshake and I went down. I got a free dinner, and we put out a tip basket, and it went very well. I've got to say I do like playing solo. More and more I'm treating solo gigs more like concerts; more chatter, and more stuff that I like to play or even wrote myself. It's more personal.

Not that I dislike playing with the band. Jon and Ken are excellent musicians and we have a great time. Band gigs tend to be more about getting people to dance than to listen. But I get to play electric guitar, and that's big-time cool.

The places I play solo are usually pretty small. Actually, the only other place I'm doing solo lately is the Colatina Exit in Bradford, VT, which is also a very nice gig. For PA, all I'm bringing is my powered board and a pair of monitors, which I lay on the floor and point toward the audience. I'm tellin' ya, these are small rooms. No need on bringing my 12's-and-horn mains and putting them up on stands.

So maybe I'll see you at a solo gig sometime soon. I'm playing the Colatina Exit on the 21st, and the Greenhouse the first Friday in December. In between, on the day after Thanksgiving, the Red Hat Band is at the Bridgewater Inn.

And, of course, post-election thoughts

2008-11-09T22:17:00.002-04:00

I'll cut right to the chase; I don't have a problem with President Obama. In fact, I am surprised to be able to report that I'm kind of thrilled.

Remember, I'm a child of the sixties. I still get a kick out of telling Lynn that I'm old enough to remember when the liberals were right. Racism didn't end when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclaimation. Nor when Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And it's not over yet.

If I were in Boston or some other urban area, late at night, walking down the street, with nobody else around, and suddenly noticed a black man walking behind me, I would be scared. And, I would be more scared than I would be if he were white. I admit it. Not because I believe in any real difference between the black man and his white counterpart, but because of the odds. There are more blacks in prison than whites, in spite of their being in the minority. And, because I'm not a city boy.

The change from racist to race-blind is an intellectual decision. It's wrong, I don't want to be wrong, so when I'm on that street and see that man's reflection in a window across the street, I just keep walking. It's too late now anyway. I acknowledge the flash of fear, tamp it down, and just keep moving calmly along. And this is not theoretical. I've done this, and been there. And here I am.

There are certain things I fear from an Obama presidency. And, I might not fear them from, for instance, a Hillary Clinton presidency. The Clintons represent the side of the Democratic party that knows the Republicans are mostly right, but hate them for personal reasons. They know that lower tax rates on the rich stimulates investment, and that raises revenues because you can only tax dollars that move. So, they don't do much about those tax rates. They inch them up a little, but more to manage the rate of inflation than anything else.

But Obama is a true believer. He thinks that Jimmy Carter was right, and that everything would have turned around if we'd have kept going that way. Between Eisenhower and Carter, the top tax rate hovered between 80 and 95%, whereas now it's about 35%. Obama and his wing are under some delusion that this not only creates job but increases federal revenues. Want to see the current economic crisis turn into the second great depression? Jack corporate tax rates back up. Ah, the good ol' days.

The other thing I'm afraid of is that he and Nancy Pelosi and their bunch will start to restrict my freedoms. They've made it pretty clear they'd like to see the Fairness doctorine reinstated, which would be a death blow to Rush Limbaugh and maybe even Fox News, depending on how the courts interpret it. This shows one of the big differences between Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans have had years to do something about the obvious left-leaning bias of the mainstream media, and didn't make a move. They let the marketplace decide.

But the True Believers of the left are so convinced they're right, they can't tolerate dissent. So, to prove they're open-minded and loving, they'll try and shut down anybody who disagrees with them. Look what the Ohio Secretary of State tried to do to Joe the Plumber. These people know that Christians and conservatives are their enemy. They just know it!! So nobody can be free until we're not, right?

The other stuff isn't so much inducing fear as it is frustration. Federal entitlement programs will be expanded, which will get billions of taxpayer dollars into the hands of small-time petty thieves who could actually hold jobs if they had any ambition. On the up side, they'll also help a lot of people who need it. If they fill out the forms correctly, that is. The irony is, it's harder for honest people to get help from these programs than dishonest. People who would rather steal from the government than get a job they could easily do are better at filling out forms and jumping through hoops than people who are disabled or otherwise honestly need help.

But this is what the country wants. And I think it would be good to wait and see if it works out. First of all, you've got to admit, Barack Obama is obviously more honest than Bill Clinton. The fear I had about Slick Willie was that he'd sell out the country in a heartbeat if it served his own interests. Obama, on the other hand, at least appears to be more interested in serving his country.

And the simple fact is that sometimes it's time. If you really look at things, the biggest difference between the policies of Ronald Reagan and Herbert Hoover were the fifty years in between their administrations. Hoover got to preside over the stock market crash of '29 and the beginning of the great depression. The regulations imposed in the intervening years helped prevent the abuses that caused them. They also stifled business. So Reagan loosened things up again. Some regs were removed that shouldn't have been, and that gave us the housing bubble. But Clinton and the Dems are the ones to blame, because it was done to open the housing market to the underpriviliged.

Maybe now is the right time for compassionate liberalism. I think if they let their hopes lead instead of their fears it could be pretty good. Good enough to frustrate the hell out of a lot of conservatives that hate Democrats on principle alone. So I plan to give the man a chance.

Some pre-election thoughts

2008-10-26T17:40:00.003-03:00

There's a scene in the movie, "Dave," where Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver are sitting and talking. Kline plays a small-time entertainer and businessman who happens to bear a striking resemblence to the sitting President of the United States. He is hired to impersonate the President for a simple walk to the limosine while the big guy stayed upstairs. The big guy ends up having a stroke, and Kline finds himself staying in the chair.

Weaver plays the real President's wife, who quickly figures out what Kline is; a fake. Apparently her relationship with her real husband leaves a lot to be desired, and she finds she gets along much better with the fake. Even though the evil Chief of Staff has kept Kline in place for his own purposes, comes the moment when Kline and Weaver are sitting and talking about the fact that, as long as everyone thinks he's the President, he really is. I forget who says the line, but it goes something like this;

"Let's use all this power to do something good."

That's the trap that Liberals fall into, and that is the power OF power to corrupt. A good person, who honestly wants to do good, to help people, finds themselves with the power of the federal government at their fingertips and the answers all seem obvious. And that's commendable. But, I'm sorry, I can't help but think that sometimes there's a better way.

Here's a simple example. You need a hole in your back yard. You have a nuclear weapon. Problem solved, right? Take it to the next step; you know a million people who need holes, and that nuclear weapon should make a hole plenty big enough for everyone to share.

Now, maybe I'm just a stupid ol' hick, but it seems to me a million shovels would do the same job, and much better.

I have the same point of view when it comes to good works done by the government. Anything the federal government can do, the 50 states can do better. If possible, it can be done even better from the county or community level. I'm all for giving help where it's needed, but real help is better than political help.

This is a debate we have here in New Hampshire all the time. Our property taxes are high, but none of our other taxes are. In fact, we have by far the smallest tax burden of any of the New England states. We also have the best education system, which is the biggest expense of local government. New Hampshire is consistantly in the top three or four in every subject in the country.

I firmly believe the reason for this is that our schools are mostly funded on the local level through property taxes. It makes sense to use property as the tax base, because just about everybody lives somewhere. Even renters have to pay it, because the landlords pass on the expense. Plus, you have the added benefit of getting the bill one, two, or four times a year. It makes for an eye-popping figure that gets people interested in being involved in their local governments.

I can't think of a federal welfare program that couldn't be handled better on the local level. There's a simple logic to this. To fund a school through local taxes sends the money from a) the taxpayer to b) the local tax collector and to c) the local school board. The cost of this transfer is minimal. Now try to imagine how many sets of hands, and well-paid hands by the way, a dollar has to go through to get from the taxpayer to the school via the federal gov't. Same school, same students, teachers, books, etc. Why does the money need to go through so many checkpoints?

Same with public welfare. Or anything else, for that matter. In fact, it's kind of the great dirty secret of Conservatism, that if we cut the federal budget, we'll have to increase the budgets for state and local gov'ts. The people these governments represent will have to decide if they want these programs or not.

Another thing to consider is that the cracks that honest people inevitably fall through will be smaller. As a mailman, I had a pretty good idea of who on my route actually needed help. I also knew who was milking the system. And believe me, it's a lot easier to milk a big system than a small one. That is the conservative's complaint with federal welfare; so much of the money gets stolen and wasted. Plus, there are always people who need help and don't get it. The only way to get to them from Washington is spread the net wider, inviting more theft and waste.

I think I've mentioned this before, but my Dad had what I've always thought was a great idea; pay everyone in cash. Give every worker in the country their gross pay in cash, and then make them walk down a line of people taking so much for federal income tax, so much for social security, and so on. It would make us all think a lot more about where our tax dollars go.

So as much as I admire Barack Obama and anybody else who wants to help those in need, I think it would be better if they just got a shovel and helped somebody in their own neighborhood. And please, Barry, no more about the 'failed' Bush economic policies. They're the reason that your investments have done so well. This current crisis is not a failure of the policy. It's a glitch due to a relaxation of an important restriction. If you're smart, you'll fix that problem and then leave the basic policy untouched. Hey, it worked for Clinton.

Let's face facts, Clinton didn't change much that Reagan and Bush handed him. He'd have been a fool to. I'm old enough to remember how things were under Jimmy Carter. When Reagan cut taxes it stimulated investment and the economy flourished. Except for a few bumps here and there, it's continued to do so. We get through this and it will again. We've had a quarter century of prosperity. If you want to do some good, help that top 1% you hate so much to create some jobs that you can take credit for.

And you- yeah, you! Reading this! Why don't YOU take responsibility for helping the people you want the federal government to help? Tell your selectmen and other local officials that charity begins at home. Write your congressman and tell him, too.

Hey, good idea! I'll get right on it.

Go vote, all right?

Jihad!

2008-09-24T20:25:00.002-03:00

.
I always thought Ted Herbert invented that word. It appears in the Dune series. If you've never read any of it, it's a sci-fi series. One of those long-ago-and/or-far-away stories. There's a planet that has an essential item. One group owns it, another group wants it, but neither of them have considered the small indigineous population. This small group of locals rise up and take it for themselves. Jihad is that their messianic leader calls their war against the exploiters.

This is not too far from the recent history of the middle East. Everybody knows about the Balfour declaration, directive, whatever, that the British used in 1917 to divide the region into the shape it's in now. In the early '70's, the people who lived there took control of the valuable item that came out of the ground. Or at least, their governments did. The people of the region still live a very poor quality life. The pool of people who are extremely rich because of oil is a little bit bigger than it was before, but it's still very small.

The reason I bring this up is because of a conversation I avoided getting into over the last weekend. It almost became a debate between two friends over the election. My friend appears to have simplified a complex issue to a single, simple solution; Barak Obama means peace. There was no point in entering into this discussion. It becomes two people shouting slogans at each other, and that is not productive.

This friend has this addy, so here's my side, as if they were listening. I'll start with my slogans. The invasion of Iraq was a good idea. George W. Bush is a good President. History will NOT compare him to Neville Chamberlain.

Whew! That sure felt good. I guess I can stop there, right? After all, as long as I shout my slogans, I've done enough, right? Oh, you want to know HOW I can be so insane. Well, all right. Since you're a friend.

Y'see, it seems that the poor, downtrodden people of the Middle East are sick of it. Their own governments don't care about them, and the people who provide those governments with the billions they build their palaces with don't seem to care either. As oppressed people inevitably do, pockets of them have become radicalized. They've begun to fight back. Their own governments have too tight a grip on things at home, but hey! It's actually easier to hit the people writing the big checks anyway. Let's fly some jets into their skyscrapers!

Now, let's face facts. If they do that often enough, it could hurt this country. No, really. I honestly think that there are people who think it's all right to let downtrodden people do anything they like. Who knows? Maybe this country is so corrupt that it deserves to die.

And . . . I think that's where I'll leave it. The premise is, this country deserves to die. The world will be better off without a United States of America.

Live music

2008-08-11T18:36:00.002-03:00

Hi. A little update on live performances. Got asked to be a last-minute fill in for the monthly poetry reading at the Moultonboro public library, and found myself the opening act for a very talented young man who calls himself Redbeard Bullrider. He gave me his card, but then I had to ride home in the rain, so all the printing washed off. Still, he has a website of some sort, and if it's half as good as he is live it's more than worth the google search. He's not only very gifted, but was gracious enough to help me with a song. Thanks, Red.

The centerpiece of my performance was the CD, Rough Edges. I had nine copies with me and came home with only one. Four were paid for, two were traded for books of poetry, and the last two took my word that I wasn't interested in charging for them. Which is cool, by the way. And, if you have one, and the link has led you here, search the blog for references to "Rough Edges" to find the liner notes for the CD.

Anyway, that was all on Tuesday, August 5. On Friday, the 8th - which was also my wife, Lynn's 39th birthday - I played with the band at Bluesology. The band goes under the semi-poor name of The Red Hat Band, which relates to the red fedora I wear on stage. We never have thought of a proper name, and that is how people refer to us, so we're making the most of it.

The down side of that is that it makes it appear to be my band. It is not. It is a pretty equal collaberation between myself on guitar, Ken Anderson on drums, and Jonathan Sindorf on bass. We all sing, and we all pick material. For the most part we're classic rock, but we've been known to blur the edges pretty badly, even resorting to original material when pressed.

Which reminds me, there's an interesting gig coming up in the fall. More about that later. To see The Red Hat Band, come to the 4-wheeler annual pig roast in Warren NH on Sept. 13, or the Bridgewater Inn in Bridgewater NH on Sept. 19.

Global Warming and Four-Buck Gas

2008-07-19T23:25:00.002-03:00

It's going to wind up being one of the driving issues of this election year, that much is certain. As such, I want to pitch in my $.02 on the topic, as I don't hear anybody else taking my particular stand.

I'm sure some of you have noticed that the price of gasoline has gone up considerably in the last couple of years. You also would not be alone in noting that this coincides with the take-over of Congress by the Democratic party. No less than former Vice-President Al Gore has stated that he'd like to see it be five dollars a gallon. The other day on Imus In The Morning, NY Times columnist Tom Friedman said that there should be a federal mandate keeping the price at no less than four dollars.

These wise, accomplished people have a good reason to believe this. With the price of gas sky-high, there is a strong movement to find an alternative to fossil fuels. Many alternatives that have already been discovered are now more cost effective than when gas was $1.50. T. Boone Pickens is making waves by suggesting a combination of wind, solar, and natural gas to wean ourselves off foreign oil. All these choices were too expensive a couple of years ago.

Get it?

Besides the reliance on foreign powers, the other big disadvantage to fossil fuels is that they're dirty. Nobody's suggesting coal as an alternative, because it's even dirtier than oil. It's no big secret that this is the motivation of the left for wanting expensive gas in order to drive the move to alternative fuels. Yes, expensive fuel may be crippling our economy, but it's for the long-term good. Not that anyone expects Barack Obama to put it like that out on the campaign trail, but it's still the truth.

There are many on the right who have added this to the pile of great sins being committed by the left. There is a firm belief among many conservatives that there is no such thing as global warming, and that any amount of pollution can be absorbed by the environment. Those people should sit in a running car in a closed garage for a couple of hours and see what they think then.

The simple fact is, whether or not pollution causes warming, cooling, or whatever, it's not good to shovel dirt into the air and water. That's a no-brainer. It would be good to have an alternative to fossil fuels for that reason, if for no other.

As for dependence on foreign powers, remember for a moment that we are the biggest customers for the Saudis and their friends in OPEC. The less of their oil we buy, the less influence we have over them. After nobody's buying their oil any more, they go back to being poor. The average person there is anyway, but the royalty will join them. They've brought it on themselves. After all, the people who own the ground the oil comes out of have to be the ones getting the $140 a barrel. I have little sympathy for them. I reserve it for their people, who will benefit more by following Iraq to freedom than staying with their rich rulers into more bondage.

The biggest problem I have with the liberal position, that expensive gas is good, is that it is not good for most of the country. The average schmuck who drives to work and heats with oil is getting screwed. All that wind and solar power may replace oil for producing electricity, but our light bills won't go down either. Most of the monetary benefit will be felt by factories, skyscrapers, and other high-volume users.

Ironically, the left has come up with a solution that will most benefit the richest 1% of the populace. The rest of us will see what used to be disposable income, if we had any, eaten up by energy costs for a fuel we will have no replacement for. That may be the greatest irony of all. They are promoting the idea of clean alternative fuel to the general public, and for the most part we're all for it as long as it won't break us financially. Every time gas goes up, another diesel Rabbit gets converted to run on fryolater grease.

But the people who could make the most use of wind and solar power resist the switch if the price of oil remains cheap. It is because of their stubbornness that we are forced to put up with these crippling prices, and that's the simple truth. There will be no widespread alternative to gasoline for another century, unless the internal combustion engine itself becomes obsolete.

So which lousy alternative will we choose in November? High energy prices, or continued pollution? I would love it if any of you out there would leave your thoughts in the comments section, even if you think I'm totally off the rails. All I ask is that you be nice, and please be brave enough to leave your name.

Good gig at Bluesology 7/11/08

2008-07-12T22:26:00.003-03:00

Hi.

Well, the Red Hat Band played last night at Bluesology, the club at the Lodge at Belmont, home of the famous dog track. It's a great club, with very good acoustics, and it's been a real pleasure to play there.

We did our standard thing of classic rock covers and it went over really well. We did a lot of our favorites; Walk Away Renee, Sultans of Swing, Some Kind Of Wonderful. Plus, we're adding some new tunes to the mix; Soak Up The Sun, You Wreck Me, and Ken's really beautiful version of Wicked Games. At one point the audience was getting so into it that they cleared a bunch of tables and put them off to the side to make a dance floor. Get down with your bad selves, so to speak.

Big thanks to Jewel Fox, a good friend of the band and one of Ken's drum students, who sat in on three tunes. This allows Ken to play some guitar. Jewel is really coming along well, and she sounded great.

Our next gig is again at Bluesology on 8/8, which is also my wife's birthday. Help me talk her into coming, would you?

Also, if you email me regarding this blog, please put something about Peter Pan in the subject line. My email address is set for exclusive, because I get so much spam. I want to make sure I don't delete you along with all the offers for cheap Viagra.

Great Rock and Roll Moments

2008-07-08T21:47:00.002-03:00

There are moments in rock and roll that we keep coming back to. You hear a song start on the radio, and you anticipate the little moment's arrival. It's a personal thing, but I think it's safe to say that everybody's got their favorite ones. Below, I offer some examples. Feel free to leave your own favorites in the comments section.

The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again

Now, when I talk about moments, I don't mean songs. I mean little thing within songs that elevate them. They make us remember the song, and pull us back for another listen time and time again. We might not even notice that it's happening. In this example, we definitely notice it. This has got to be the definitive "moment" of all rock and roll.

First, we need to put it into context. The song, and the "Who's Next" album, were released in 1971. Live rock was in an overkill mode, with shows becoming more and more elaborate all the time. Kind of like tailfins in the '50s. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Yes, the big acts were travelling with semi's full of props, sets, and special effects.

Amidst all this, one of the biggest draws of the day was The Who. It was kind of embarrassing, really, because except for a laser show later in the '70s they kept things pretty simple. If you've ever seen them, you'd know why. They put on quite a show just standing there and playing. Well . . . not exactly just standing there. Except for bassist John Entwhistle, of course. The other three, Keith Moon, Roger Daltry, and Pete Townshend, are remembered as some of the most dynamic performers in music history. Even now, with only two surviving members and both in their 60s, Daltry and Townshend can throw down with the best of them.

It is to Daltry's everlasting chagrin that he had to share a stage with Townshend. It wasn't enough that Pete wrote most of the songs, he was also the ultimate stage presence. In any other group nobody would remember anybody but lead singer Roger Daltry, but in The Who he was always second banana to the skinny guitarist with the big nose.

This song and its "moment" are the one single, solitary time that Roger ever got to upstage Pete. It happens at the end of the instrumental break. The synthesizer noodles around, Moon brings in scattered drum fills, it builds up to a peak, and all of a sudden Daltry lets go a shriek from the deep, dark recesses of his gut. It is primal and cathartic. No one else could do it. Daltry can't even do it any more. It's a throat-ripping howl that sends chills up and down your spine the thousandth time you hear it.

That is what a "moment" is.

Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run

To me, this is The Boss' best album. In fact, it's one of two or three that I even like. I'm not real big on Bruce, but this record kicks ass. This song has a really nice moment, again at the end of the instrumental break. The band tumbles down the chromatic scale from root to root, Baaahhm, Baaahhm, Bahm bahm, bam bam ba-ba-ba-ba b-b-b-b b-Baaaaahhhhmmm.... The band rumbles on a I chord for a few seconds, and somewhere in the background, The Boss checks in . . .

"One, two, three, four,
Highways jammed with broken heroes in a last-chance power-drive!"

Oh, MAN!! It picks you up out of your seat.

"Everybody's out on the road tonight, but there's no place left to hide."

Bruce Springsteen - Jungleland

Last cut on the same album, and in my humble opinion his greatest song. A nine-minute mini-opera set in the mean streets of some nearly-nameless Jersey burg.

"The Rangers had a home-coming
In Harlem late last night
And the Magic Rat drove his sleek machine
Over the Jersey state line"

It builds, swirls, swims and rolls through the deep New Jersey night, special but not much different from any other night here. It slowly climbs to a peak, and then the music drops away like a roller coaster. From a driving 4:4 rocker, it bottoms out into a 2:4 dirge, nearly silent but still firm. And gliding over the top comes one, single, clear note from the saxophone of Clarence Clemmons.

Yeah, I know, The Big Man doesn't hold a candle to the great sax players like Coltrane, Rollins, and Parker. But with that one, singing, sweet note he makes the others sound like Kenny G. The note, and the sweet, simple legato line that follows it come straight from the heart and hover like your stomach on that roller coaster. When the guitar finally comes back in you realize you haven't drawn a breath in a while.

Eddie Money - Two Tickets To Paradise

Nope, don't care much for Eddie Money. Or this song, to be honest. He's like a poor-man's Springsteen, a John Cougar Mellencamp wannabe. I've seen him live, years and years ago, opening for Santana at Boston Garden. He was all right, I guess. The secret of his success apparently was the guitar player, Jimmy Lyons, who co-wrote most of the songs and led the band. They split up after a while, but eventually got back together. Last I knew they were still on the road endlessly regurgitating their three hits.

This was probably the best one. Catchy little tune, and they actually delivered it like they meant it. I've got to admit, if I'm not paying attention I actually get into it a little. Especially after the last verse, and just before the final chorus. The band executes the final turn-around and the piano player does four rapid-fire sweeps down the keyboard. Those things where you just lay the flat of your hand on the keys and run it from top to bottom. It's that moment of unbridled passion that elevates this song above the mundane.

George Michael & Elton John - Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me

Is there a lamer human being on the planet than George Michael? If so, it may be Elton John. To be fair, I actually like both of these artists. I've been a fan of Elton John's since he came out. Great songwriter, and a completely unique singer. As for Michael, I don't care much for his own recordings, but he can work magic with other people's material. You should hear what he did singing Queen at Freddie Mercury's tribute concert. Awesome pipes; just a reprehensable human being.

This recording is a live cover of one of Elton's hits from the 70's. George sings the first verse solo, and then introduces Elton. He takes the second verse, and Michael does counterpoint in the background. At the end of the verse, they harmonize on "Oooohhh," and on into the chorus. That "oh" is the moment. Chills, baby.

Dave Edmunds - I Hear You Knocking

Dave Edmunds is a weird duck. Simultaneously retro and progressive. Prog-a-billy. This song is a perfect example. It sounds like it was recorded at Sun studios on a single microphone. It bumps and lurches along like a school bus driving down a set of railroad tracks. The instruments all pound the one and three. The beautiful moment is, I think, just before the final verse. The bus bumps to a halt on the one. A beat, just one single beat, of silence. Then, on the three, one V7 chord on the piano. Just the piano. Bang, with a wince of the 7 note. Beauty.

Paul McCartney - Smile Away

This one's one of my favorites, from one of my favorite albums. Ram, 1971. Second album after he left the Beatles. First song is Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, which is definitely one of those love-it-or-hate-it songs. I happen to love it. The fade-out fades straight into the opening of Smile Away, which is one of Paul's goofy nonsense songs.

It's got a funky, rocking little beat propping up some throw-away who-gives-a-f*&$ lyrics. In the background, Linda and somebody are singing what sounds like "Don't-know-how-to-do-it" over and over. It bops, and bops, and bops, and bops along until just before the final verse Linda changes the background to Yaaaaahhh, yah-yah-yah-yah-yah-yah-yah, be-Dump be-Dummm. It's just enough to push it over the top. Great stuff.

Foghat - Slow Ride

This one harkens back to the original example. Foghat is one of the great underrated bands in rock history. They are the '65 Chevy Impala of rock and roll. Now, in the new century, a '65 Impala looks pretty cool. Back then, it was just another family car. Dig out your long-unheard copy of Fool For The City or Rock And Roll Outlaws and give it a spin. They were surprisingly sophisticated, although we didn't appreciate it at the time. After all, the seventies were the time of progressive rock, and sophisticated meant you rearranged Wagner for a four-piece band. If they came out now, they'd be huge. And, like AC-DC, every album sounds basically the same. They started off great and stayed that way.

Slow Ride was far from their greatest song, but it probably had their greatest moment. Rod Price was one of the great slide players in rock, and Lonesome Dave Prevrett (sic) was a singer of surprising range and emotion. Slow Ride is a bawdy little ditty that bumps and grinds seductively along. Da-dump (thump) da-Da-dump (thump) da-Da-dump (thump) da-Do-n-Dooo, all the way through the last verse. In the instrumental break it builds in speed and intensity until you think the top of your head is going to come off. It goes and goes and goes and then comes to a screeching halt. Then, Lonesome Dave pulls one from the bottom of his toes.

"Ssslooow rriiiiide!"

Followed by the greatest crash-and-burn ending ever. It's beautiful, and brutal, and delicious.

Dave and Rod have departed this mortal coil, but the music lives on. It is this moment, and the ones above, and the ones like them, that are the reason that rock and roll is so great. It takes from every kind of music that came before it and after it, and boils it down to its essence. Then it is placed into the hands of a passionate person who hopefully has learned to play their instrument well enough to translate that passion into music and timbre.

Of course, I've forgotten a few thousand good examples of these moments. Feel free to share your favorites.

Bike Week

2008-06-19T11:42:00.002-03:00

Going to the Weirs during bike week is kind of like going to the fair. Except you bring your own ride. And, it's definitely geared toward grownups.

I can remember back in '64 or '65 riding home from a Saturday night at the races in Loudon with my folks. We hopped in the car and turned on the radio and immediately learned that it would be a good idea to make a detour from our regular route. There was a riot in progress at the Weirs, on the edge of Lake Winnepesauke in Laconia, NH. It was being led by a large contingent of the Hell's Angels motorcycle club. Governor John King had called out the NH National Guard to help the Laconia PD bring order, and they arrived in armored troop carriers.

The Guard and the Police rolled over the drunk-and-disorderly bikers like a truck. The authorities suffered zero casualties. The same could not be said for the bikers.

The centerpiece of Bike Week is a motorcycle race, which is now sanctioned by the AMA and held at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. It's possible that as many as 3 to 5 % of the people coming to Bike Week actually attend the race. The rest are here . . . well, mainly because the rest are here.

It's a chance for the locals, who deal with tourists year-round, to act like tourists themselves. They get to walk around and gawk at the bikes and bikers. The place to do this is the Weirs. You can see motorcycles all over New Hampshire during this time, but there is no greater concentration of them then at the Weirs. And the best part is that most of the vendors are from out of town, so we locals can take a day off and just watch.

This year, 2008, is the 85th annual race. In the mid-1960's the race moved from wherever it was held before to Bryar Motorsport Park, a road course that also hosted sports car races, etc. One prominent feature of BMP was a knoll that overlooked the track that came to be known as Animal Hill. This was where the hardest partying took place. In the early '90's, Bob Bahre, owner of Maine's Oxford Plains Speedway, bought the track and converted it to a one-mile oval that now hosts NASCAR and the like. There is a road course, where the motorcycle race still is held, but Animal Hill is gone.

The best time to hit the Weirs is early in the week. By Friday the real crazies, the former occupants of Animal Hill, are arriving in force. The alcohol begins to flow in earnest, and it starts getting a little dangerous. On Tuesday or Wednesday, most of the bikes are expensive Harleys owned by lawyers and dentists. The well-behaved brothers and cousins of the Angels of '65.

And yes, it is definitely geared to adults. The central theme of bike week is "F--- you." It's everywhere. I never realized that there were so many ways to phrase this simple, arrogant statement of defiance. And all of them can be emblazoned on a t-shirt, ball cap, bumper sticker, tattoo, or whatever you like.

I rode to the Weirs on my Yamaha 750 on a Wednesday. I made the mistake of not getting there until about 11 am, but was lucky enough to find parking reasonably close for only five bucks. On a good Wednesday it's possible to get there early enough to park among the herd in the middle of the main street. Not only is that free, but you have the thrill of being among hundreds of really cool bikes.

The first time I rode there on my own putt, I had a 400cc Honda with a milk crate bungee-corded to the back of the seat. As I climbed off my humble little rat-bike, parked among all the chrome-plated American iron, I noticed I was being watched by two particularly heavy, hairy, leather-clad gentlemen on the sidewalk.

"It's not the bike, it's the man," I said, staring them right in the eye. They nodded, smiled, and let me live.

Bike Week is oriented around American motorcycles, and Harley-Davidsons in particular. I once saw a neat little tableau at the Weirs. One guy was standing on the sidewalk, dressed head-to-toe in Harley logo clothing from his boots to his do-rag. His friend - I assume they were friends - was sitting astride a shiny Yamaha Royal Star, a full-dress Electra-Glide knockoff. The Harley guy was merciless in his derision of his friend's 'rice-burner.' Finally, he said the magic words:

"A real man rides a Harley-Davidson," he said.

The friend gave him a sour look and said, "A real man . . . does as he damn well pleases."

Translation: F--- you. Amen, brother.

I had a great-uncle who rode a motorcycle. This was back in the day when the only bikes available were Harley-Davidsons and Indians. The Harleys were more reliable, but the Indians were faster. Uncle Earnest rode an Indian, and the New Hampshire State Police rode Harleys. He liked riding real fast, so he knew from personal experience just how fast the Harleys of the NH Highway Patrol were. Finally came the day when two troopers rolled up to his home. He thought they were there to arrest him. Instead, they asked if he would like to join up. He said he would, under one condition; that he get to use his own bike. From that day on, the New Hampshire State Police were all-Harley, but one.

My Uncle Jim Parris always had a full-dress cruiser, usually a Harley Electra-Glide. There were a few years during the late 60's when he gave it up. People were so scared of the Hells Angels and their ilk that it became difficult for the average Joe to ride in peace. Now, the Average Joe IS bike week. It's become an event for the upper middle class, who have enough money to buy the bike and can take off enough time to enjoy it.

When going to the Weirs, I try to blend in. A little mid-week bad-ass. A little. I wore a black t-shirt with a Fender Telecaster on the chest, and a hat with the Unites States Postal Service logo on it. Don't tread on me. I got a pretty good deal on a new jacket, saw a lot of cool bikes, dropped some words of encouragement on a few Christian biker ministries, and listened to a couple of good bands. Not a bad afternoon, all in all.

Bike Week dominates the whole state of New Hampshire. It used to be Motorcycle Weekend, but now is two weekends and the week in between, and is dribbling over into the weeks on either end. It is reviled by many, but makes so much money for the state that it is accepted and even encouraged. The sound of rumbling motorcycles can be heard everywhere.

Last year, on the Monday after bike week, we were at work at the Moultonboro post office right off route 25. Suddenly, one of the clerks stopped and said, "Hey, wait! Hear that?"

We all stopped. "I don't hear anything," somebody finally said.

The clerk smiled. "Yea-a-ah," she said.

Translation: F--- you. Amen, sister.

Quick update

2008-04-26T11:05:00.003-03:00

Hi.

Just a quick update on things in general. Now that the NH primary has come and gone, I'll be concentrating on music again, I suppose.

You may note a new link, for another blog called IDIC. This is one by a couple of friends of mine from Frontier Fleet. Both are conservatives, and both Americans, but with markedly different points of view. East and West coast, high and low tech, young and old, but both very good and quite insightful writers. Check them out.

I'm in a band once again, playing with old friends Jonathan Sindorf and Ken Anderson (bass and drums respecively). We've been playing at the Bridgewater Inn in Bridgewater, NH mostly, with the odd thing at the Country Cow (Plymouth) and occasional private parties. Check us out at the Country Cow, just off exit 26 of I-93 in Plymouth on June 6. Also, at the Bridgewater Inn on May 16.

I've also been playing occasionally as a solo, mostly at the Colatina Exit in Bradford, VT. Great Italian food. Check them out. No upcoming bookings there, but I'll keep you posted.

On the down side, one of my all-time favorite music venues will be closing at the end of May. The Middle Earth Music Hall in Bradford, VT is in its final month, so click the link to their website while it still takes you somewhere and pick a show to go to. You won't regret it.

That's all for now.

Saturday before NH Primary

2008-01-05T19:05:00.000-04:00

Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello . . .

Dirt Track NH is actually getting some attention, but I'm yet to get any comments at all from this blog. Except for the interview with Reggie Mantle, of course, but that's understandable. FYI, sometime in the near future there'll be an interview with Jughead Jones! I've still got editing to do, but it was a great time, if a little tense.

Anyway, it's the Saturday night before the 2008 New Hampshire Presidential Primary, and I would be remiss in my duties as a sharer of deep thought if I let it pass without saying something. It's also turning out to be a pretty exciting contest, in spite of a dearth of candidates. Oh, there are names on the ballot, but JEEZ!

I'm a registered Independent, as is my lovely wife, Lynn, so we're getting mail and phone calls from EVERYONE! Lynn's seriously thinking about taking a Democratic ballot, but I'm pretty sure I'm taking a Republican one. As I write this, I'm watching a 24-hour news channel - I refuse to say which one - and the fallout from the Iowa caucuses is still falling. Obama won handily for the Dems, with Edwards second and Queen Hillary an embarassing third. On the Reps side, Huckabee beat Romney by about 10 points.

So, from a STILL undecided NH Independent (and aren't we all, really?) here are my thoughts on most of the major candidates. And, to make it all on the up-and-up, I'll list everything alphabetically. But first, my thoughts on some of the major issues of the day.

COMPETENCE: I think this is an important thing to think about when choosing a President. In my lifetime I've seen every president from Eisenhower to Bush 43, and it looks like a pretty difficult job. I've seen people take the job that had the best ideas and intentions, but simply were in over their head they day they got there. Think Jimmy Carter. Was there ever a nicer man? I believe he honestly did what he thought was the best for everybody, but nothing went right for him. The economy tanked, the middle east went in the toilet, and when he left we were in the 444th - and last - day of the Iran hostage crisis.

On the other hand, for all his problems and general bad attitude, Richard Nixon was imminently competent. Yeah, he tried to clothesline his opposition in the '72 election and had the secret enemies list and acted like a despot, but when it came down to the day-to-day business of running the country, he could do the job. He was a master politician, which means he was a juggler of ideas and people and managed to almost always keep all the balls in the air. He ended the Vietnam war, and even got us out on our own terms. He negotiated the SALT 1 and 2 treaties with Breshnev, which is the most anyone's done to date about nuclear proliferation. And, he opened China. Even when faced with a major inflation problem, he tried to solve it with his Phase 1 and Phase 2 price controls. They didn't work, but they were inspired ideas that had never been tried before.

The most amazing thing about Nixon is that he built his reputation on being a far-right-wing anti-communist, but as president did more for more liberal causes than Kennedy and Johnson put together. I remember a scene from near the end of Oliver Stone's movie bio, where Nixon is weeping, and says to Kissinger; "I gave them everything they wanted. Why do they still hate me?"

Good question. Personally, I think Nixon was a better president than Carter, because he was competent. In my lifetime, I would rank Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton the highest in this catagory. The lowest would be Johnson (and I liked him), Carter, and Clinton.

GAS PRICES: Is there anybody, outside of a few conservative talk-show hosts, that don't believe that the price of gas is decided by the companies together? If the free market were truly in charge here, it would be going down. It's a mature industry. Plus, it's not like there's not a plethora of sources for the stuff. We all know that the Arabs and Venezuelans and Mexicans and everybody else get together to set the price, which has nothing to do with the cost of production.

There is one fact that should be considered; the money we spend on oil is the only tangible influence we have on the middle east. We're their biggest customer. The more we become energy independent, the less influence we will have there.

It also suggests that the oil companies have too much influence on our government, because we should be negotiating a better price with some of the providers. If we could cut a deal with Saudi Arabia, then Venezuela would have to drop their price to sell to us. The dirty secret that too many highly-placed conservatives don't want to address is the huge influence that oil companies have over them.

In the end, it is imperative that we DO come up with a viable alternative to oil. For both the short and long terms. Not just for our national security, but for the future of the race and the planet. Have you ever realized that most modern energy sources involved burning something? Whether it's oil, or wood, or coal, or the oxidization of plutonium, most modern energy sources leave a residue that is very hard to recycle. Maybe it's time to look back, to the days when wind and water powered the engine of industry and transportation.

Because industry and transportation will continue. It is what differentiates the most powerful countries from the poorest. It is also, especially in the case of transportation, what a free people do. We make things and go places. America produces the pollution it does because we all travel, wherever we want, whenever we want. We are a car culture. If you follow the logic of most liberal environmental policies, they would inevitably restrict that car culture. Think about that next time you want to go somewhere.

The fact is that on this day, at the store down the street, the price of regular is over three dollars a gallon. There is nobody running for President who is going to be able to change that. It will change when the oil companies and the producers wish it to change. Which means, either we will do something to please them, or to intimidate them. All the Democrats will stroke the providers and piss off the companies. All the Republicans will do the other. And we won't be rid of either. Alternative energy can get rid of them both. Then, the middle east can go back to what they were before 1900; poor.

HEALTH CARE: Do I think there should be a Government program that will provide health insurance for everybody? No. It's too easy to abuse. I personally think most government programs should be done from the state or local level. If the State of New Hampshire wanted to consider a state-run health insurance plan for those who could prove they can't afford any other kind, I'd consider backing it if it were written wisely.

The problem with anything like this - and by that, I include Social Security, Medicare, etc. - is that it's so easy to abuse. Granted, publicly available free health insurance would be a heck of a lot better than a totally socialistic health care system. I can remember watching a debate on C-SPAN between the leaders of the five major Canadian parties back in the '90's. Even the most conservative didn't dare suggest the possibility of privatizing health care, they just promised that they'd run it better. Once it's in, we're stuck with it.

The fact is that we have the best health care system in the world. Presidents of other countries come here when they have major health problems. Most of the advanced drugs, technologies, techniques, etc. in the field of health care come from here. Yes, some doctors, hospitals, and maybe even some nurses and orderlies are overpaid and abuse their power. I suppose socialized medicine would cure that, the way that shooting a dog would rid it of fleas.

I simply think that the free market has way more potential for fixing problems than the federal government. As for people who don't have insurance, we should tread lightly and carefully, because some of those people CAN afford to have it. They're just waiting to see if there's a hand-out in the offing.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION: The thing to remember in this phrase is that it includes two words, the first of which is ILLEGAL. We have immigration LAWS, which should either be enforced, or changed. PERIOD. If we're going to have borders, and regulate who can and cannot cross them, then we should do whatever it takes to enforce those regulations. Walls. Troops. Whatever. As for the people who came here illegally, they should be made to leave. Tough job. Gonna take a long time. Better start NOW.

Some on the far left are trying to recast this argument as one about immigration. I have nothing against people trying to come to this country. There are legal ways to do it. Use them. If you snuck in, no visa or passport, go home. Don't go to our hospitals, ask for a hand-out, or put your kids in my kids' school. GO HOME. Get a passport and a visa and drive or walk up to the border. Smile, show your paperwork, and welcome to the US of A. Call ahead, and I'll bring some sandwiches.

IRAQ: How long have people been begging God for someone to do something about the Middle East? Well, George W. Bush is finally, FINALLY doing something. And it's very good thing that we, as a nation, are trying to do. It is important that we win, not just for us, or the Iraqis, but for the rest of the middle east and for the world.

That thing is, bring a Democratically elected Republic to the middle east. Some people say that this form of government won't work in the Muslim world. They said that about Japan after World War 2. They were wrong then, and they're wrong now. As Winston Churchill once said, "Democracy is the worst form of government . . . except for all the others." Democracy CAN work in the Muslim world, just like it worked in the Buddhist/Shinto world, the Catholic world, the Protesant world, and anywhere else, because it is governing at the direct endorsement of the governed. We have a major revolution every four years, and a minor one in between. We, the people, overthrow our own government on a regular basis. This keeps us from, so far at least, getting stuck with a Hitler or Saddam Hussein because of a couple of bad days.

The United States is an ongoing experiment in this form of government. In 1776, it had never been tried. Some really intelligent people decided that it was time. So far, it's worked out pretty well. For all the problems, possibility and reality of corruption, unfairness, it's still the closest thing to a Heaven on earth that has ever existed on this world. Maybe Haliburton is running the version of it that exists in Iraq right now - and maybe they aren't - but as soon as we take our hands off it the people of Iraq can change it. Democracy works. We've got it, let's export it.

And just a quick aside on this whole "weapons of mass destruction" complaint. First of all, that was one of 14 reasons to go in, all of which were valid. And, everybody everybody EVERYBODY believed he had them. Then, thanks to the UN's dithering, we gave him fourteen months to get rid of them, which he did, in Syria. What they did with them, God only knows. President Bush can't say that, though, because we have to maintain the illusion that we're nominally allied with Syria. And that's the way it is.

WAR ON TERRORISM: It's simple. There are people in this world who have banded together against us, the USA, because we are infidels who, in their opinion, wrongly influence the world. They wish us dead. We have to stop them. Not out of hate, but because they won't stop unless we MAKE them stop. That's another reason why I support the war in Iraq; because Saddam's Iraq was a safe haven for these people.

The real question is, does America deserve to survive? If you think not, then you should join Al Qaeda. They are the strongest force currently trying to destroy us. If, on the other hand, you DO believe America deserves to survive, then you shouldn't get in the way of the people that are trying to stop our enemies from destroying us.

I'll agree that there is corruption in our government. Democrats say it's all on the Republican side, and vice versa. Both are right. At the end of the day, where else would you want to live? If, by the miracle of the internet, somebody from another country is reading this, there has to be at least some small part of you that wishes you were here. This isn't a cut on Europe or Russia or Japan or anywhere else. It is a simple statement of fact. We are the movers and shakers of the world. The poorest Americans are better off than the middle class of a lot of countries. Without us, your lives will change, and not for the better. If Al Qaeda or anybody else takes us out, you will suffer for it. Please, for your own sakes as well as ours, help us win this thing.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY:

This is not the Democratic party I grew up with. My wife is 14 years younger than me, and raised by conservative Republicans. I like joking with her that I'm old enough to remember when the liberals were right. You know, back when the issues were Vietnam and civil rights. Whatever happened to those people?

I recently read a book on the history of the Whig party, and I was amazed by how little things have changed from the 1840's. Politicians do the same dirty tricks; they're just better equipped now. The Whigs came from the remnants of the Federalists, along with the Democratic Republicans who didn't like Andrew Jackson. They were bound together less by ideals than by opposition to Jackson. That's how todays Democrats look to one who remembers Kennedy, Humphrey and McCarthy and has read a lot about FDR, Truman, and Adlai Stevenson.

Clinton, Hillary Rodham: Is there anyone who actually believes a word this person says? I'm sorry, but let's face facts; right now, this whole election is about her. 80% of the electorate has already decided what they think of her, and the main reason for holding the election is to find out which way most of them will go. We either love her, or hate her. The ones who are undecided may very well decide the outcome of the 2008 election IF she gets the nomination.

Disclaimer: I listen to many different sources for my news. I firmly believe that every news source is biased, because that is simply human nature. So, I listen to NPR, watch CNN and Fox, and also listen to conservative - and liberal, when I can find it - talk radio. I say that because I want to tell you that I heard this on Rush Limbaugh. Supposedly, Hillary's senior thesis in college was about Saul D. Alinsky. Mr. Alinsky proposed that there should be revolutionaries that sneak in the back door and change the system from inside. This suggests that Hillary is one of those. (I would refer the gentle reader to a book published around 1980 called "The Aquarian Conspiracy.") This, from a former Goldwater Girl. FYI, here's a link to the MSNBC story on the topic:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17388372/

With all due respects to Mr. Alinsky, if that's true, and if she wins, she's going to have to filter everything she wants to do through the democratically-elected congress, and the Supreme Court that was left in place by her predecessors. Don't worry, she can only do so much damage. We're America. We've put up with worse than her.

I see her as Bill Clinton with a mean streak. You may have noticed above that I ranked Bill Clinton among both the most- and least-competent presidents. That's because he really did nothing. He leaned a bit to the left, but not enough to derail the healthy economy that Reagan and Bush built. Still, it would have been nice to have someone with vision in charge. I think Hillary has vision, and she's yet to reveal it. She spouts the platitudes she thinks people want to hear, but she has a secret agenda. Her '93 health care plan revealed part of it. I believe she's a socialist, but she can only do so much.

Edwards, John: This guy should be made to watch tapes of his own stump speeches. I get the impression he's never heard anything that he himself has said. Listen up, people; he's a trial lawyer. That's how he made his money, and he's got plenty of it. He's a rich fat cat who made his money off the misery of others. His answer to everything is to surround himself with victims, and then promise to use the power of the Presidency to get back at the people who have made these victims miserable.

Obama, Barak: Nice kid. Come back when you're not so wet behind the ears. Oh, he won Iowa, and is tied with Hillary in NH? Shit, he may win. Y'know, he's a little too free with the public purse, and he sounds like a warmed-over Hubert Humphrey in his stump speeches. Even Jack Kennedy knew that if you cut taxes for the rich, they invest. Don't kill American business and send us back to the Carter years, please.

In all seriousness, the thing I'm keeping an eye peeled for is his handlers. He's a kid, as far as politicians go. He has liberal ideals, and that's not altogether bad, because I honestly believes he cares about people and thinks he's on the right track. He's enough of an idealist to be . . . acceptable, I suppose. BUT, he will need a lot of help. There are a lot of strings between the fingers of the President, and he doesn't realize yet just how many. If his handlers are crooks, then he'll be another US Grant/Warren G. Harding/Jimmy Carter. If they're people motivated by a clear vision of how the world should be, he could be the liberal George W. Bush. Which means he'll try and do idealistic things. So look out.

Richardson, Bill: Governor of New Mexico. No chance. I've heard he's strong on controlling the borders, and the gun people like him. My wife, Lynn, is seriously considering voting for him. Or Obama, just to tweak Hillary. Imus likes him too, but I think he's still backing McCain. To his credit, he's probably got the best ideas, but he's got no chance. If Iraq's an issue for you, he's promised to have our troops home within 6 months of his inauguration.

REPUBLICAN PARTY:

The Republican party has also changed. The party that nominated Dwight D. Eisenhower had a wing that followed Coolidge's dictum; the business of America is business. What's good for General Motors is good for the country. Then you had the populist wing, which was a lot more electable after the Great Depression. That wing was probably a remnant of the party that nominated Lincoln.

Barry Goldwater changed things, by codifying some new ideas on conservatism. The big business wing became the right wing. Barry may or may not have made a good president, but Ronald Reagan put a lot of his ideas to work, and work they did.

Back in '88 Newsweek printed a list of some of the subdivisions of the major parties. The one I most identified with was "God-and-country Democrats." In a nutshell, I have a social conscience, but it leads me to vote Republican. I come from New-Deal-Dem stock, and my ideals and values haven't really changed, but as time goes by I see the Republicans as having the better way.

Basically, everybody wants the same things, and all politicians promise them. Peace, prosperity, security, equality, and liberty. Gone are the days when a ruler could just decide to declare war on a whim, raise an army, and go get a whole bunch of innocent people killed. You don't like Bush? Read some European history.

Also gone are the days when one group could overtly insist on better treatment than another. I can actually remember when the public debate included topics like, were black people as good as white? Were they worthy to eat in our resturants, ride our busses, or date our girls? I know there are still people who think in such narrow terms, but they keep it to themselves.

Anyone who considers themselves a conservative in 2008 should ask themself if they could have been one in, say, 1964? 1929? 1860? Would you have thought that schools, etc. should be segregated? That big business should be allowed to manipulate the national economy, no matter what the outcome? That some people should be kept as slaves? I used to be a liberal, but guess what? We won! Progress happens.

Giuliani, Rudy: I keep coming back to this guy. I think Hillary would shred him, but we might not have to worry about that. Let's face it, the guy's got mob connections, he's been married three times, I disagree with a lot of his social positions, and his own kids aren't going to vote for him. But I might. I like his ideas on reducing the size of the federal government, and nobody else has ever paid more than lip service to the concept.

He's proven himself capable of making tough, unpopular decisions and seeing them through. Sometimes people forget that everybody in New York hated him until 9/11. He did completely turn that city around, though, in spite of all the opposition. He uprooted a lot of deeply entrenched corruption while he was there. I think the beltway dreads this man. I wish he was pro-life, but the Supreme Court's in pretty good shape.

Huckabee, Mike: Congrats on winning Iowa, Mike. You may be the guy that keeps me from voting for Romney. Not that I'm going to vote for you.

Don't get me wrong, now. I appreciate the fact that he is up front about his faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. There are two simple reasons I'm not voting for him. One is that I simply disagree with a lot of his stands. He's doing that populist thing, which means he's promising that Government will solve their problems. Government does a lot more to cause problems. Shoot, you take away his talk about his faith, and he sounds like John Edwards. Plus he's pretty weak on border security, and he doesn't really believe in the Bush doctorine.

The other reason is that competence thing. I just don't think he's got what it takes to do the job well. He'll be bound to his handlers, like Obama, and there's too many times that this simply hasn't worked out. I think he'd wind up a Republican Jimmy Carter. Mike, you're in over your head. Go home.

McCain, John: If he gets the nomination, I'll have no problem with voting for him. I think he may be the most capable candidate of either party. He will do the job expertly. I do have some serious differences with him, though. I think he's too soft on illegal immigration. I also think he'll be a little too free with the public purse.

He will strongly prosecute the war on terror, though. He will also get things done. He is probably the most capable of crossing the lines on the floor and getting people to work together. I also think he will be the most comfortable working with foreign powers. Plus, he will not be subject to his handlers. He's a leader.

Paul, Ron: No, really. Oh, okay.

Truthfully, he's got some halfway decent ideas and raises some salient points. He's right that the special interests have far too much influence over our government. I like that he thinks we should balance the federal budget, every time. In the end, I think he's pure-d-wrong about Iraq. He talks like 9/11 never happened. He's casting the Bush administration in the role of evil conquerors, and I'm sorry, but that's not the deal. There is no way on God's green earth that I would vote for this man.

Romney, Mitt: Up to last week, my most respected political confidants on the right side of the aisle were all undecided, but this man was their second choice. And, their wives were voting for him, and that's it. As of now, my wife has rejoined the ranks of the undecided, but she was trying to talk me into Mitt for the last month.

I think he'd make a pretty good president, actually. I actually find his candor regarding his changes of heart on some issues - or, as they're commonly known, flip-flops - refreshing. I especially liked his explanation in a debate regarding why he changed his stand on abortion. He said that he was for it, until the first time he had to sign a bill that allowed it. And he found he couldn't do it. He admits to being human. I'd like to see a little more of that, instead of a bunch of juggling to prove that yes was really no. I find the words "oops, sorry," from a politician to feel like a breath of fresh air.

One quick note, on the outside chance that somebody from the National media ever sees this. New Hampshire Democrats identify with their counterparts in Massachusetts, but NH Republicans consider Mass. Republicans to be just another kind of Democrats. Being from our immediate Southern neighbor is not to Mitt's advantage. And, Curt Schilling has already endorsed John McCain.

Thompson, Fred: I'm seriously tempted to vote for this guy. In a lot of ways, I like him the best. He's ignored NH, though, and will likely leave with no delegates. That didn't affect me in 2000 or 1996, when I voted for Alan Keyes. I was making a statement. Fred's hoping for a good showing on Super Tuesday. So far, that strategy's never worked. It sank Al Gore in 1988, and Jerry Brown in 1976. Fred and Rudi may find that the question is already decided, and they're left out.

As far as his stands on the issues, Fred is the John McCain that I can agree with. He's a good old-fashioned Goldwater/Reagan conservative, and I've got to tell you, it works. Confession: I was raised by FDR-New Deal liberals, but the Democratic party left me. I got out of the service just before the Carter administration and watched how the country changed under Reagan, and I'm a believer. So is Fred. But, like Reagan and George W., I also suspect he'd let the Federal Government keep growing.

GEORGE W. BUSH:

Might as well talk about him. After all, he's the fellow all these other people are anxious to replace. Good luck to them.

I think he's been an excellent president. A man of action and decision. He has, once and for all, proven the dictum of the beltway; if you want to make enemies, do something. Most politicians spend their time desperately trying NOT to do something. It's like a dance, with a lot of movement, and a lot of noise, that keeps the status quo in place. After all, things are pretty good as they are, right? Let's create the illusion of activity and call it progress.

I think that Bush spends way too much money, and that he's probably in the pocket of big oil. But, when we needed action, he provided it. He showed the UN for the dithering do-nothings that they really are and began a process that, one way or the other, will result in change. Either we will continue his work and all be the better for it, or we'll back up and the people who suffered under the status quo will continue to rise up against us.

I believe that history will be very kind to Mr. Bush. One thing it will not do is compare him to Neville Chamberlain.

TWO PEOPLE I WISH WOULD RUN:

Jerry Brown: Former Governor of California, son of Pat Brown, former Governor of California. This is the guy that Mitt Romney reminds me of when Mitt's explaining why he changed his mind. Brown had this gift as well. When California agriculture was falling victim to the gypsy moth, he refused to spray for environmental reasons. When it became clear that the people wanted it, he threw up his hands and led the charge.

He ran for the Democratic nomination in 1976 and again in 1992. In '76 he started too late, and Jimmy Carter got the jump and the nomination. Our loss. In '92 he was a dark horse that was given no chance. But he hung in there, won the Maine primary and a couple of small caucuses, and when the circus got to New York there was only him and Clinton standing.

I watched Clinton beat him, in a one-on-one debate on Phil Donohue's show. Brown is a visionary, and he would lean forward, practically rubbing his hands while describing what he perceived to be the reasons to vote for him. Clinton sat back, relaxed, and agreed with almost everything he said. The way it came off was, Brown looked like a lunatic while Clinton was polished and controlled.

The big difference is, Clinton didn't really do anything. Brown would. Check out the work he's doing as mayor of Oakland, California. Or did as Governor. He has visionary ideas on mass transit that could actually make them an acceptable alternative for people who travel by car. Granted, I certainly don't agree with all of his ideas, but he has so many that there's plenty of good ones.

Condoleeza Rice: The current Secretary of State, and a damned good one. She is brilliant. I have to admit, I don't know what any of her stands are, except for the assumption that she's in favor of President Bush's foreign policy. One thing is for sure, she's very intelligent, highly accomplished, and a super hard worker. She is the most travelled SecState in history. She has negotiated successfully with the leaders of nations where a black woman normally isn't allowed to show her face, much less represent their government in sensitive negotiations.

She is also living proof of the liberal bias of most of the American media. Remember all the acolades when Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House? Where were they when Bush named the first black woman SecState? It would have been big news if Bill Clinton had named her to the post. But he didn't. Most of his cabinet was white men.

. . . and finally . . . The President we need now:

Everybody likes invoking the names of great Presidents past. Truman, FDR, Lincoln; all great. The Republicans like calling on the spirit of Ronald Reagan. Another good choice. On tonight's debate, John Edwards compared himself to Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican. In your dreams, John. Here's three of my favorites, who don't get mentioned often enough:

Andrew Jackson: I'll grant you, he was cruel to the Indians and owned slaves, but as far as running the government he was one of the best. He had the courage of his convictions right down to the bone. He took on the Bank of the United States and its president, Nicholas Biddle, in a fight that threatened to ruin the American economy. The bank ruled the economy, and Biddle thought he ran the country. Jackson refused to re-sign the bank's charter, which came up every five years. He thought it was too much power in one man's hands.

Biddle proved him right by immediately calling in all its loans on businesses and farms. By the time he got through squeezing, public opinion was firmly behind Jackson. I think about this every time I hear anything coming out of the Federal Reserve. People thank Bill Clinton for the good economy of the 90's. They should thank Allan Greenspan, and then thank God that Greenspan liked Clinton. He didn't like George H. W. Bush, and so he engineered a little recession in time for the '92 election. It's amazing what you can do over the short-term with a little adjustment to the prime interest rate. Yeah, a little of Ol' Hickory would be nice.

John McCain strikes me as the candidate that has this kind of moral strength, and possibly Fred Thompson and Rudi Giuliani.

Grover Cleveland: This man made his reputation as a reformer while Governor of New York. Under his administration, the size of the federal government actually shrunk. It may have been the last time, to date. He ticked off so many people with his unwavering frugality he got beat out of a second term. His replacement, Benjamin Harrison, was so incompetent that Cleveland got reelected the next time around.

Rudy Guliani's simple but effective plan for reducing the size of the federal government reminds me of Grover.

Woodrow Wilson: Wilson was the whole package; a visionary who could stand on the ground and get things done. If the allies who won the First World War had followed his 14 points, we might well have avoided the Second World War. As it went, France and England insisted on cruel retribution in the old-fashioned style, and the League of Nations went the way of the Articles of Confederation. He was a man ahead of his time.

I think Jerry Brown could be that kind of president.

If you're lucky, that'll be all I have to say on politics for a very long time. Pop the champagne, and don't forget to vote. And while you're at it, lie to the pollsters at every opportunity.

Interview with Albus Dumbledore

2007-12-10T12:32:00.000-04:00

This is an interview with a man who really needs no introduction. Lead guitarist for The Order Of The Phoenix, he later went solo, while continuing to do the occasional Phoenix project. It was thought that he would go on to be bigger even than the Beatles or Elvis, especially after he shut down Gellert Grindelwald in a guitar duel at the Isle of Wight festival. Instead, he devoted himself more and more to the business side of the music industry. His own records have shown remarkable growth for an artist over the years, as he preferred to follow his own muse over the winds of popular acclaim. Even so, his legacy is more firmly rooted in the young artists he’s nurtured over the years.

Known now as “The Professor,” he is the Chief Executive Officer of Hogwart’s Group, one of the oldest music companies in Great Britain. Covering the recording industry, music publishing, management, and even an advanced music academy, it is believed that Albus Dumbledore has had at least as much influence over the music we hear today as he might have following the star of his own popularity. It was a rare privilege to sit with this great artist for a private interview.

-------------------

RC: Thank you for the gracious invitation to speak with you today, Professor.

AD: The pleasure is all mine, I assure you.

RC: It’s not many artists who can boast the recent release of their seventh Greatest Hits album.

AD: Strictly a business decision, I assure you. There’s not a great deal of recent material on it that actually made an impact on the charts, but the release puts a little life into the old catalogue. (Laughs) Not that I need the money any more, but one likes to create the illusion of being relevant.

RC: I think your relevance is pretty firmly established, if I may say so. Far beyond your sales figures, and they are impressive.

AD: Thank you for saying so.

RC: There are those who would say, beyond your artistic accomplishments, you are quite simply one of the most powerful men in the music industry.

AD: Oh, do they now? And just what does that mean?

RC: (After a significant pause) Well, simply that . . . you have a great deal of influence in the world of music.

AD: And where might that world be? Hmm?

RC: I’m not sure I . . .

AD: Quickly, what’s the biggest hit you can think of?

RC: Biggest hit? Song? Oh, probably . . . Stairway to Heaven, or Hey Jude . . .

AD: Let’s say Stairway to Heaven. A classic, to be sure. Hardly anyone between the ages of sixty and ten would fail to recognize it. In a hundred years if you were to dredge up the name ‘Led Zeppelin’ that song will surely spring to mind. I understand it is the most broadcast song in history. And yet, to someone driving down the road listening to it on their car radio it’s seven minutes of their commute; nothing more. It was preceded by another song, and followed by yet another. If Stairway To Heaven had never been written, the DJ could substitute Hey Jude, or anything else.

RC: I suppose so . . .

AD: So what kind of power is there, really, within what you consider the ‘world of music?’

RC: Well, you know . . . the power to increase wealth, to grant fame, establish a legacy –

AD: But all relating to a luxury item, essentially. Popular music is the sort of thing that gives one power on the scale relative to the amount of money you earn from it. When I was young, we were trying to achieve real power.

RC: What do you mean, real power? You mean, use your fame as a platform to, say, run for public office?

AD: (laughs) My dear boy, a pop star already has more power than a Prime Minister or a President. A politician’s powers are clearly deliniated, and he owes his very soul to outside interests who exercise their power behind the scenes. But even somebody like, for instance, Hannah Montana can affect the very way people think. Now, that’s power. And we were looking even beyond that.

RC: I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I’m following you.

AD: All right . . . here’s an example. How many cycles per second is the A below middle C?

RC: 440, I believe.

AD: That is correct. And an octave above?

RC: 880?

AD: Correct again. And an octave below is 220, and below that is 110, and so forth. To get an A that is one hundred and ten cycles per second, you’d have to take the bottom string on a five-string bass and tune it down a whole step. An octave below that would be 55 cycles per second, and on and on. Now, can you tell me what note the planet Earth is playing?

RC: . . . er . . . planet Earth?

AD: In order to know that, you have to know how many seconds in a year. And not just break 365 days down to hours, minutes, and seconds. It might be in some scientific journal somewhere, and I’m sure there’s a little flexibility of a few seconds every year, but it would be possible at that point to halve it, and then again, and finally get a note within the hearable range that would be a relative octave with the note the Earth is playing. Or Mars, or Saturn, or Mercury. Now, to a student of astrology, this could potentially have more of an impact than the chart position of a song. If you wanted to influence destiny, of a person or the planet or any other subject of a song, you would write the song in Saturn’s key, because Saturn is supposed to be the planet of destiny.

RC: I’m beginning to see.

AD: That’s not the only example of the potential power of music, either. There were musicians who were trying to reproduce the state of mind attained through transendental meditation, or psychotropic drugs, and for the listener as well as the performer. We were all reading about how the pyramids must have been made by telekinetic energy, and we were even trying to tap into that. Through the intelligent use of music, anything seemed possible. There are still those who strive in these directions, I’ve no doubt.

RC: So why did you stop? Or did you?

AD: I did, and the reason is simply this; power corrupts. I found that out the hard way, unfortunately, during my ill-conceived partnership with Gellert Grindelwald.

RC: I’ve seen the articles about that. It created quite a stir when that information became public.

AD: He was attempting no less than mass hypnosis, and in experimentation I was quite frankly shocked by the direction things began to go. We had half an album in the can, and I don’t mind telling you that I burned the tapes as soon as Gellert left. I am happy to report that no bootlegs of those sessions survived. He carried on alone, which is why I stood against him at the Isle of Wight.

RC: I hate to say it, but . . . I can actually see some benefits to such things. You know, if the right people use the methods you were exploring . . .

AD: Congratulations. That’s the same kind of thinking that gave us rock stars like Adolph Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung. It’s tempting to take power and put it in the, quote-unquote, right hands. Trust the word of someone who’s held power in his hands; it’s dirty. You can’t use it to make things clean. Believe it or not, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, and their ilk honestly believed that they had the best intentions when they set out to do the things they did. The people we should fear the most are the ones who believe they are on a mission from God, and are seeking to power to BE a god.

RC: But isn’t it worth the risk, in order to –

AD: Every child knows that there are powerful people in the world who are abusing their power. The people who populate our daily newscasts don’t even have the tenth share of the real power, and everybody knows that, too. The answer is not to replace one form of bondage with another. The answer is to give people the power to free themselves.

At this point, I leaned back in my chair and quickly skimmed over my notes. I suppose I had a look of concern as I turned my attention back to the old Professor.

RC: Excuse me, but . . .

AD: Is there something wrong, dear boy?

RC: I’m sorry to say it’s . . . beginning to sound like an advertisement for impotence.

Dumbledore blinked rapidly and smiled.

AD: I beg your pardon?

RC: It sounds like you’re saying that power is bad, so don’t have any. Enjoy being nothing.

AD: (laughs) Nothing so Zen as that, I assure you. First of all, it would be terribly hypocritical of me to take that attitude, don’t you think? The one with all this power in the world of music? By all means, go ahead and do whatever it is that you do, and accept the benefits gained. But then, what will you do? Will you grasp what you’ve gained, or will you open your hand? Will you keep these blessings for yourself, or will you choose to be a blessing to others?

That was the biggest disagreement that I had with Gellert Grindelwald. He did not trust his fellow man. In a way, I could see his point. Unlike many others, I believe humanity is a fallen race. And yet, if we’re going to change the world, these are the people we have to deal with to do it. A perfect world will have to be populated by perfect people. Unfortunately, there’s only one person whose life I have any real lasting control over; my own.

Grindelwald had ideals, but he thought the thing to do was make everyone else adhere to them. He couldn’t even adhere to them himself. He never realized that people behaving correctly requires that they trust one another. Unless you make mindless robots of them, of course. But if people are to have free will – and they most certainly do – then we simply have to trust each other.

RC: But didn’t you just say that you believe humanity to be a fallen race? How can we truly trust each other?

AD: We bite our tongue and do it anyway. Not stupidly believing everything that everyone says, of course, but as a means of bringing out . . . what was it one of your Presidents once said? The better angels of our nature.

RC: Abraham Lincoln.

AD: Indeed. The Bible says that we should keep our minds on that which is excellent, praiseworthy, beautiful, and so forth. How can we do that at the same time as we’re finding fault with everyone? Finding bad things to think about is ridiculously easy. My job, as an artist and a teacher and promoter of artists, is to fill the world with so much good that the bad gets crowded out. It’s easy, and even profitable, to shock people. I find it much more fulfilling to inspire them.

Robert Plant and Ronald Reagan

2007-12-09T07:38:00.000-04:00

I know I've been very music - and in particular, guitar - centric lately, but this is a general-topic blog, and it's almost time for the NH Primary, so I'm going to talk a little politics. Hope you don't mind. Tough cookies if you do.

Got to confess to being a semi-reformed political junky, and living in New Hampshire kinda shoves me off the wagon every four years. It's a very frustrating year, too, as there's nobody out there that particularly lights my candle. There's usually somebody, even if they don't have a prayer. Unfortunately, this year the most interesting candidate is Dennis Kusinich. Scary. Allan Keyes, where have you gone? Anybody seen Jerry Brown around? Or maybe Pete DuPont? Dear God, anybody but Hillary!!

A lot of people complain about the New Hampshire primary, but I think it's the perfect place to get right down to brass tacks about some basic prinicples. It's a good place to discuss the differences between Liberal and Conservative, because NH is a state full of eccentrics. Extreme is the norm here. Anyway, the point I'm trying to get to is one of the most basic.

One thing that everybody agrees on is that it takes money to run a government. Gotta pay the army, support foreign dictatorships, etc. One side (I'll let you guess which one) says we gotta raise taxes, especially on rich people. I'll grant you that there's a lot of people in the world, and in this country, that have more money than brains. Or class. But before we start reaching into their pockets, let's consider a little history.

Remember the George Harrison song, Taxman? One for you, nineteen for me? Believe it or not, that was the tax rate in Great Britain at the time. 95%. Guess Old Blighty showed those rich so-and-so's.

So consider the tale of one Robert Plant, lead singer for Led Zeppelin. Back about '74 he was in a bad car accident in Greece. He returned to England where he received the best of care. Then, one night, against his Doctor's orders, he checked out of the hospital and was put on board a helicopter to continue his recuperation in Switzerland. Why? Because if he'd stayed one more day in England he'd have been subject to their income taxes.

So, instead of 95% of what he made that year, the Crown got . . . nothing.

So go ahead. Raise the taxes on the rich. That's what the Caymans are for. Instead of 36% of whatever they make, the country can have the pre-Reagan rate of 78% of . . . NOTHING!!

My father once had an idea that I still think would be a good one to try. Pay everybody in cash. Have all the employees line up and somebody from the company count out what they earned straight into their hand in cash. Then, you walk down a line and FICA takes so much, and Social Security takes so much, and so on. And when you're peeling off those bills from that wad that you worked for, smile. I think it would take about one of those paydays for there to be a major tax revolt in this country. We would start asking those people we handed OUR money to just what they planned to do with it.

I've worked for the Government. I served a hitch in the Navy, and I've seen where a lot of our tax dollars go. I've been made to carry 75-pound boxes of pork chops off the ship and into the trunk of a Chief's car. I've sat on those $8000 toilet seats and used those $500 screwdrivers. Just from the abuses I've personally seen, I would bet that a good 1/3 of the money the Federal Government gets are stolen. And that doesn't even get to the assinine things that we throw buckets of money at.

Conservatives like to argue that tax cuts, like the ones that President Bush gave, actually INCREASE revenues. Liberals act like they don't hear that, and say the gov't needs more money, so let's raise taxes. I wish one side or the other would actually publish figures. In such-and-such a year, the tax rate was X and XX dollars came in. Compare it with year YY, rate of Y%, intake of YYY dollars. Bush Jr, Reagan, and Kennedy all cut taxes to raise money. Bush I let a tax hike go through, and we had a minor recession. Could we see some damned figures, please?

I think it was Ron Paul (who I do NOT like, and who I think is a complete banana) who recently said that the biggest problem with the Bush tax cuts is they weren't deep enough. They should have been cut enough to actually make less money come in. Ron Paul may be a nut, but he's right about that!!

So that's my thoughts on taxes. Don't get me started about Iraq.

The 5 Most Important Guitarists

2007-07-12T22:42:00.000-03:00

Yeah, I'm a guitar player. Sorry 'bout that. That explains why this blog is so guitar-centric, though. So, consider yourself warned.

As for today's topic, these are not necessarily my favorite guitarists, or a comprehensive list of the ones I think are the best. I'll get to that, don't worry. No, these five I'm honoring here are the ones I believe have had the most influence on the instrument, the way it's played, the way it's presented, and the prominence it now enjoys. Last time I saw a figure on the subject, it was estimated that there are roughly 20 million guitar players in the United States. We have just emerged from what could easily be called "The Century of the Guitar." If that is true, all twenty million of us should bend the knee to these five people.

And, no, these are not exhaustive biographies or discographies of these people. For that, I recommend you start with http://www.allmusic.com/.

The first on the list (which is roughly chronological, by the way) would have to be Andres Segovia. He was born in Spain at a time when the guitar was something that proper ladies learned to play so they could entertain guests in the parlor. I'm sure you've seen instruments that were referred to as "parlor guitars." Well, that's what they mean. It's one of the things you learned at charm school.

Oh, yes, there was guitar music, and even professional guitarists, but it was considered a small instrument that played small music. It was Segovia that forced the world of music to acknowledge it as a serious musical instrument. He showed it to be a versatile instrument rhythmically, harmonically, and melodically. He transcribed many great works for the guitar, and commissioned many more. By the time he reached middle age, composers were lining up to write for the guitar, and for Segovia.

Once he'd established its potential, Segovia fought long and hard to maintain the purity of the classical guitar. To the end of his performing career he refused any form of amplification. To his ear, even a microphone could not accurately reproduce the tones. A Segovia concert, no matter the size of the hall, was absolutely silent while the Maestro played so that nobody would miss anything. In middle age he met a young Chet Atkins. He was quite taken with the talented young man, and even gave him playing tips, until he found out that Atkins played electric guitar. He never spoke to him again.

In spite of this, he was a prolific recorder and a shameless promoter, not only of his own music, but of the classical guitar in total. And just as shameless an innovater. Just about everything that we take for granted about the classical guitar, from the little footstool to the length of scale, the shape of the body, the construction, the tuning, just about everything was directly influenced by Segovia.

To put it simply, the guitar as we know it - not just classical guitar, but the guitar in total as a musical force - would not exist without Andres Segovia.

The next on the list is Charlie Christian. He has been called "The first guitar hero." As big band jazz was giving birth to be-bop, he proved that the recently-invented electric guitar could solo right along with the trumpets, saxophones, etc. Until Charlie, the guitar was relegated to the rhythm section along with the drums and upright bass. Comp chords and keep time. It didn't matter if you could play scales and runs, because nobody could hear you over the horns anyway.

Jazz guitars were arch-topped in order to help them project, and builders tried everything they could think of to make them loud enough to keep up with the band. When Gibson began producing the ES (for Electric Spanish) 150 Charlie was one of the first pros to get one. Before long his name became synonymous with that model. It also became synonymous with jazz guitar. When musician's musician Benny Goodman put together a sextet on the side, he tapped Christian to play guitar. The Benny Goodman Sextet not only laid the groundwork for the next twenty years of jazz innovation, it was the first major multi-racial band in American popular music.

Unfortunately, Charlie Christian died in 1942 at way too young an age. As I recall, it was tuberculosis that claimed him. Whatever it was, he was only in his twenties. To me, that makes it even more amazing that he had such a huge influence in such a short time. Every time you hear an electric guitarist take a solo, thank Charlie Christian.

Which brings us to Les Paul. If Les had never played a note, he'd have been a huge influence on modern music. The man invented multi-track recording, fer cryin' out loud! Before Les Paul, you went into a studio, turned on the machine, and hoped you could produce a good performance. If you wanted something to be heard on your recording, you'd better bring it with you.

Les figured out that if you put two recording heads side by side, they could record two different tracks on the same piece of tape. Before long he and his wife, Mary Ford, were making recordings in their home using nothing but his guitar and her voice. Amazing recordings, rich in tone, timbre, and harmony. On the road, they didn't need a band. Just a copy of the backing tape. Throughout the late '40's and early '50's they produced hit after hit.

Les was also an innovator of guitar construction. He had the idea for a solid-body electric years before anybody was making them. He tried for years to get Gibson to listen to him. They refused, until Leo Fender's Telecaster came out. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed like a pretty good idea after all. To this day, a Gibson Les Paul model is one of the most coveted guitars.

But after all that, you've got to sit down and listen to the man play. And damn, could he play! Still does, in fact. At this writing, he just turned 92. He still has a gig every Monday night at a club in New York City, and everybody who's anybody drops by to listen, and maybe even jam a little. Les had - and has - that wonderful combination of technique and flash that makes his music irresistable.

Next up; Chet Atkins. Quite simply, this man has influenced the playing of practically everybody who's followed him. What is most surprising about that is that he did not come from the world of Classical music, or even Jazz, but Country-Western. Classical, and nowadays Jazz, get studied in college. Country, on the other hand, is now and has always been a music of the people. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, Chet has without a doubt influenced more guitarists than anyone who ever lived.

A brief history of fingerstyle country guitar goes sort of like this; in the beginning was Mother Maybelle. "Can The Circle Be Unbroken" is only one of the many famous songs Maybelle Carter wrote for the Carter Family. In the '20's and '30's, she, husband A. P. Carter, and her siblings - and later, her daughters - would harmonize, often accompanied by nothing more than Maybelle's guitar.

She had a unique style for the day. She would play a melody on the bass strings with her thumb, and in counterpoint strum chords on the upper strings with her fingers. It was a simple style that created a lot of music. The great Merle Travis turned the idea on its head by playing alternating bass notes with his thumbs and countering with arpeggios and melodies on the treble strings with his fingers.

These two greats by no means invented fingerstyle guitar, however. It was the standard way to play Classical guitar and lute, long before Segovia came along. But most Jazz, Country, and other "folk" musicians strummed with a plectrum. Mother Maybelle and Merle helped bring a new level of harmonic and rhythmic sophistication to their music.

Enter one Chester Atkins. As a young man he was hungry to improve his playing, and so he began studying Classical guitar. And yet, instead of becoming a Classical guitarist, he brought what he learned back to the music he loved. This as much as anything about Chet proved to be a huge influence on all who followed him. Nowadays it's common for musicians to cross the lines between styles. In Chet's day, it was considered a pretty radical thing to do.

Chet went on to become A&R Chief for RCA records, as well as the label's senior producer. In this role he literally set the standards for country music for decades. He is the man we can thank - or blame - for bringing country music uptown. He is the reason that the best musicians and songwriters can now be found in Nashville.

Toward the end of his life as he began to step away from the business end he returned to his first love; the guitar. He recorded a number of duet albums with musicians he admired, including Merle Travis, Mark Knopfler, and two grammy-winning collaborations with Les Paul. He was practically a regular on the Prairie Home Companion radio show.

The final guitarist on my list is none other than James Marshall Hendrix. Like Charlie Christian, his life and career were cut short. And, like Charlie Christian, he forever changed the way that guitarists approach their instrument.

To me, the basic idea behind Hendrix' style is that of the electric guitar as an orchestra. He would find a new sound in his instrument and figure out how to add it to his palette of colors. To him, the guitar wasn't just a part of the band. He truly believed that with a bass player and a drummer he could play anything he wanted.

The key ingredients were volume and electronic processing. As Metal instrumentalist Steve Vai has pointed out, "volume IS tone." The more you turn your amplifier up, the more possibilities you open up. The slightest touch to the guitar makes sounds, and he used them all. He would lightly brush the strings, tap on the body and back of the neck, play with the strings above the nut, work the switches and potentiometers while he played, and generally use everything he could find.

To all this mechanical manipulation he added the ever-growing line-up of effects pedals that were being invented in the 1960's. Wah pedals, phase shifters, flanging, echo, reverbs, delays, octave dividers, leslie cabinets, whatever anybody came up with to alter the signal, he'd give it a try. Experience Bassist Noel Redding told of the frustration he'd feel when somebody came to the studio with a new toy. Instead of working on the song, Jimi would start exploring the latest gadget. He and drummer Mitch Mitchell would leave, have lunch, hang out, go shopping, and when they came back a few hours later Jimi was still at it with that same toy.

To most guitarists before him, feedback was something to be avoided at all costs. He learned how to conjure it and play it. He showed all of us guitarists that there's more to our instrument than melody, harmony, and rhythm. When Adrian Belew imitates elephant shouts, he's following Hendrix. Same with Sonny Landreth when he plucks behind the slide. And Kaki King, when she explores the sonic boundries of her Ovation acoustic. Or Eddie Van Halen when he dive-bombs with his whammy bar. All hail, King Jimi.

At the time of his death at the age of 27, Jimi was preparing to do a recording session with Gil Evans and a small orchestra. This is the same Gil Evans that Miles Davis recorded three of his most highly acclaimed albums with. Jimi was looking at ways to go beyond what was expected from him as a popular musician, and not just as a guitarist. His compositions were getting longer and more complex. You can see it in Electric Ladyland, Band Of Gypsies, and the recordings that the family has released as First Dawn Of The New Rising Sun.

There. Whew. Finally glad to get that off my chest. Let the debate begin.

My favorite music stores

2007-07-03T03:40:00.000-03:00

As a public service, this is about a handful of music stores I think it would be worth your while to check out. Remember that I live in central New Hampshire, so all the stores are in that general area. Also remember that I am a guitar player, so the list leans heavily to that end of things.

Also, you should know that I'm not a big fan of big music stores. Although from time to time I do business in them, I never really feel at home in them. It's rare to find one that really knows a lot about everything they have in stock. If you want an electric guitar, you'd better want a Strat or a Les Paul or nobody's going to be able to answer your questions. On the other hand, a good small store with a few product lines can usually give you intelligent answers about everything in the store.

These are laid out in roughly geographic order, from South to North. No other ranking should be implied.

WORKING CLASS MUSIC, Tilton, NH.

Link: http://www.workingclassmusic.com/

This is where just about all of my PA gear has come from for the last ten years. Greg is the owner, and he's a good guy. A little terse sometimes, but straightforward and honest. You may not like everything he says, but you can take it to the bank. Working Class is a long-time Peavey dealer, and if I had to buy anything musical on name alone, I'd lean heavily to Peavey. Their stuff always sounds at least pretty good, and often damn good, and it's tough as nails. Greg's also got a good selection of reasonably priced guitars, which often includes some real gems. He always seems to have a couple of inexpensive Stratocasters I wish I could buy.

They actually have a website again, although Greg's never relied much on the internet for his business. He's notoriously bad about answering his emails, so call him on the phone. He's also got a selection of hand-made jewelry.

VINTAGE FRET SHOP, Ashland, NH

Link: http://www.vintagefret.com/

Dave Coburn is a figure of almost mythic proportions to the local music community. To be sure, some people are disdainful of VFS and Dave. In part, because he's not afraid to ask what he really thinks a piece is worth, and then let it hang there until he gets his price. But also, because he sets the standard for small music stores in New Hampshire. Everybody at some time or another bends the knee to Dave. He's done it all, and still stands head and shoulders above the rest. Most of the proprietors on this list think of Dave as a friend, and even a mentor.

The famous profile of Dave that is the icon of the store shows him with the long beard that he actually hasn't worn in years. I've known him, and shopped with him, since before he could grow it. His store on Riverside Drive in Ashland is a treasure trove of fine fretted instruments, although if you're on a budget he's got something for you as well. His long suit is acoustic guitars, and VFS sells both Martin and Taylor flattops. He's also a Fender dealer, and there's always a bunch of lust-worthy electrics hanging on the walls.

They've also got a world-class repair facility. Yes, Scott thinks everything he touches becomes worth its weight in gold, but he gets away with it because he's very, very good at what he does. I've learned over the years to only ask once what a repair will cost, because every time you ask, the price goes up. You can trust, however, that if you put your precious axe in their hands it will be treated right.

DAVE ALLBEE, Main Street, North Haverhill, NH
Phone: 603-787-6196

Dave doesn't have a website that I'm aware of. I don't even know if he's got an email address. What he does have is magic hands. He is my repair guy of choice. I'm also proud to be able to call him my friend. Even if I have nothing to fix, I try and make it a point to stop by and swap stories with him from time to time.

The biggest thing I ever threw at him was my Guild dreadnaught. It's a 1969 D44 with pearwood back and sides, and it got rather unceremoniously dropped on its heel a number of years ago. Half a dozen good repair people had me convinced that I'd never play it again. One said they'd use the neck and put on another top, back, and sides. Another said they could fix it, but it would cost $1500. Everybody else said simply not to bother.

When Dave saw it, he looked it all over real good. Then, he described step by step how he would fix it. When he'd finished, he quoted me a price of $200. I left it with him. A month later, I picked it up. That was three years ago, and I'm still playing it. The man's a genius, I tell ya. I saw him take an Epiphone ES335 copy with a badly warped neck and straighten it out. I don't care what it is you need fixed, you owe it to yourself to at least let Dave take a look at it.

He also buys and sells various used instruments. He's got a nice selection of acoustic and electric guitars, mandolins, fiddles, and you can even get the standard accessories there; strings, picks, tuners, cables, etc. He works out of his house, so it's pretty casual. You catch him at home and he's open. His place is just north of the N. Haverhill town building on main street. When you stop in, tell him I said hi.

NORTHERN LIGHTS, Littleton, NH
Link: http://www.northernlightsmusic.com/

Dan Soloman's the principal dude here. Brilliant musician, and a super nice guy. He built this place up from a hole in the wall with his own instruments into one of the North country's premier music shops. He's got a big acoustic guitar room, stocked with shiny new Taylors. The main part of the store has two walls full of a variety of electrics. But the room that knocks me out is the electric room, stuffed to the gunnalls with the best that Fender, Gretsch, etc. have to offer, and lined with shiny new amps.

He's also got keyboards, effects, sheet music, damn, the place has everything. And he's even reasonably priced! Recently, a friend of mine was interested in purchasing a hollow-body electric guitar. We went to a big-name store in the Southern part of the state, found what he wanted, and got the salesman down to his rock-bottom price. They were just about to close the deal, and I pulled my friend aside. I told him that Dan had the identical guitar hanging on his wall for fifty bucks less. The salesman scoffed.

Buddy, if you're reading this, I wasn't kidding, and you blew a sale. Bob loves his new Gretsch, and he really loves the deal Dan gave him. Tempus fugit.

FRIENDLY RIVER MUSIC, Cornish, ME.
Link: http://www.friendlyrivermusic.com/index.htm

I'm tempted to name this place my new favorite, even though I've only been there once. I was absolutely flabbergasted by the selection of guitars and amps this place had. And, it's all housed in a barn attached to a house on a side street near the river in Cornish, Maine. If not for the classy hand-carved sign in the front yard, you'd never know it was there. A hidden treasure, to be sure.

Let's start with the wall full of classic Fenders, Gretschs, Gibsons, Martins, Taylors, and anything else your pit-pattering heart can imagine. On top of that he also sells new Fenders and Taylors. Then, we go to the amps. Fender, Rivera, and Orange amps dominate the floor, including a really sweet collection of old Champs. Yes, he's got some inexpensive stuff, but he's a firm believer in quality. We talked for an hour about amp cabinets, and why he likes real plywood over particle board. "Would you make a solidbody guitar out of particle board?"

From the lakes region of New Hampshire, take US rt. 25 to Maine, stay on 25, and when you get to Cornish keep an eye out for a nondescript sign on the left directing you down a side street. Hint for first-time visitors: Ask to see the Hunt Tele. You won't believe your eyes, or your fingers. And, be sure you check the hours before you go. He's got a day job, and if you get there in the early afternoon you're out of luck.

GREEN MOUNTAIN GUITARS, Bradford, VT
Link: http://www.greenmountainguitars.com/

This is not a music store, but Glen DeRusha makes the best acoustic guitars I've ever played, so I'm giving him a shout-out. His workshop is in his garage. Open his website and you'll immediately hear one of his guitars. He builds them one at a time, and he seems determined to price his guitars below those of every other boutique luthier in the world. It's a case of getting way more than you pay for. You owe it to yourself to go to his house, accept his gracious hospitality, and bless your fingers with one of his git-fiddles. You'll never forget it. For myself, I've been talking to him about building me a 12-string.

'Nuff for now. Keep on rockin'.

A couple more Rough Edges tracks

2007-04-16T21:21:00.000-03:00

Well, there's a couple more copies of Rough Edges out in the world, so I might as well get on with the business of doing the liner notes. Tonight, I'll tell you about tracks three and four.

3 - The Train Song

This was inspired in part by the 13th chapter of First Corinthians, but the musical form came from a TV show I was watching on PBS one night. It featured a group of women folk singers, and included the Indigo Girls, Holly Near, and several others. I liked the way the songs tended to be put together. I especially liked the light touch they used to get their points across. It was gentle, thoughtful music and so much of mine at the time seemed heavy-handed in comparison.

It's in a standard tuning, but capoed on the third fret. The little opening theme is from Elizabeth Cotten's "Freight Train," so credit where credit is due. I couldn't resist putting it there. I hope Ms. Cotten's estate will be satisfied with a small percentage of the vast profits I've realized off the six or seven copies I've sold so far. ;>

4 - Speaking In Tongues

The long title for this is "My Fingers are Speaking in Tongues." Lyrically speaking, it's pretty self-explainatory. The music came from a warm-up exercise I came up with that makes use of a lot of 'tone clusters.' That's where you take a chord form usually used in the first three frets of the guitar and shove them up and down the neck. Cool stuff.

Both of these songs differ from most of this collection, in that they were recorded at New Sherriff Studios in Laconia, NH. I believe this facility is now defunct, as the Sherriff, one Dave Marsh, has left the area. Too bad. Very generous and talented guy. He was part of a three-piece project called MD2, which put out one CD. Musically, it's kind of in a little grey area that resides between New Age, mellow Techno, and soft jazz. It was a sax player, a percussionist, and Dave on electronic stuff. He helped turn Greenlaw's Music in Laconia back into a serious music store. Anyway, I recorded these two songs and the opener, "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins," at his place.

Rory Gallagher

2007-03-24T12:19:00.000-03:00

http://www.rorygallagher.com/

One of my favorite guitarists, and one of my biggest influences on the instrument, is Rory Gallagher. A bluesman from Ireland, he's not very well known in the US, but he was a big star in Europe.

I first heard Rory back in the mid-seventies. I had a friend named Barry Sutton who turned me on to a lot of great music. I was just starting to get serious about playing the guitar, and Barry changed my point of view forever by playing me "Irish Tour '74." At that time Jimi Hendrix was the center of the guitar universe. You were either trying to sound like him (Robin Trower, Frank Marino) or you were going in completely the opposite direction (Steve Howe, John McLaughlin). You have to remember, this was a pre-Van Halen/Stevie Ray world.

Rory was the anti-Hendrix. I was, and am, a big Hendrix fan, but Rory's approach was so breathtakingly fresh that I couldn't resist. Like a lot of other players at the time, I was busy filling the floor with effects pedals. My biggest mistake was to get a pretty good guitar and a pretty good amp, and then try and make them sound better with stomp boxes. Fuzz, flange, phase, compression, you name it and I had it parked a toe-tap away.

In contrast, Rory's rig at the time was dirt-simple; a Stratocaster, a Fender Twin Reverb amp, and a cable. That's it. And man, he could make that thing talk! Lately I've been digging through my collection and his albums hold up well over the passage of time. They don't sound the least bit dated. On the contrary, they prove the staying power of good ol' straightforward blues-rock.

Recommended titles? Just about anything is going to be a treat, but the older stuff has questionable production values, and some of the later stuff is a little over-the-top. I'd recommend starting with Irish Tour '74, the best of his three live albums. Live In Europe from '71 is a little more blues-centric, and his 1980 Stagestruck shows him in an almost heavy metal mood.

My favorite album of his is the studio effort from 1975, Against the Grain. I'd also point out Top Priority from '79, and Tattoo circa '73. These are the best-sounding recordings, and the quality of the songs is among his best. There are also some very good live DVDs out there, including a video record of the aforementioned Irish tour, and a new 2-disc set taken from his five appearances at the Montreaux Jazz Festival.

For a longtime Rory fan, Live At Montreaux is a little disturbing. News of Rory had always been a little spotty, and you get to see how his life progressed as well as his music. Sadly, he died in 1995 of complications from a liver transplant. That tells a lot of the story right there. His life apparently revolved around three things; playing the guitar, chasing the skirts, and drinking. From what I've heard he actually had the liver transplant around 1990. For a couple of years he took a little better care of himself, but eventually settled back into his old ways.

The Rory Gallagher we see from his 1994 set is a heavier, sadder man than the one who jammed with jazz great Larry Coryell in 1975. He used to have either two or three pieces behind him, but here he had at least five, and brought on Bela Fleck for a couple of tunes. He smiled, but still looked sad. He and the band took a leisurly stroll through the tunes, playing with convuluted endings and aimless solos. And still, every now and then, the brilliant strat-master would occasionally peek through, showing flashes of not just the old brilliance, but actual growth as an artist. At 47, the only thing he'd lost was his reason to live. He'd done it all, and simply didn't know what to do next.

His brother and manager, Donal, keeps the flame alive. There's an excellent website, the link for which is above. Interest in his music keeps most of his catalogue in print, so while it might take some detective work to actually find his CD's, it's certainly not impossible. If you like good rock guitar playing and feel like some get-down kick-ass rock and roll, you owe it to yourself to give Rory a listen.

A couple more songs

2007-03-21T21:38:00.000-03:00

5 - The Painter's Song

My brother, Rett, is a painter. We've always had sort of a mutual admiration society between us, because I wish I could paint, and he wishes he could play music. I am also a huge fan of his painting, and have many examples of his work hanging in my house.

Every fall Plymouth, NH has an art show on its town common. I've managed to get to several of these events over the years, and I get a big kick out of it. The one problem I have with it is that it's kind of landscape overkill. Nothing wrong with a good landscape, but when you've got fifty or seventy-five painters showing their work, and the vast majority of them are showing New England landscapes, it gets to be a bit much. I don't blame them, because that's what sells, but after a while they all sort of run together.

So, I usually end up finding that one painter that is doing something radically different. This song was inspired by a fellow whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten, but I'll never forget his art. I could go on and on about it, but suffice to say it was very striking. This song was inspired by a trilogy of paintings he'd done, two of which he still had. All together I think it referred to the twilight of the gods. One was of a small group of Norse gods looking like the morning end of an all-night drunk. The other appeared at first to be little more than swirls of brown and beige color, but on closer examination was a mass of nude bodies all mingled together. Very striking.

6 - Heroes

This one was written as I was reading "Taliesin" by Stephen Lawhead. He spent a couple of years in the British Isles researching the Arthur legends, and in the end got four books written. Personally, they're my favorite telling of the tales.

One of the core ideas that's always in the back of my mind is that everyone has greatness within them. I believe that with all of my heart. Too few people in this world are willing to truly make the effort to try and live up to their own ideals. It's like Albert King used to say; everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

As a Christian, the example I try and follow is that of Christ, but of course I have much more than his example to follow. That's the advantage the Christian has. Whatever it is that you are into or believe in, you owe it to yourself to set yourself aside and follow that which you believe is the core of true faith. Find out if it works, dammit. Use yourself and your life as a laboratory. Then, you can speak about it with authority.

For myself, I have put Christ, His spirit and His word to the test for 23 years and counting, and my life has progressed. I have tried to follow the hero's path. Not very well, I'll grant you; lots of mistakes and failures, but then again I don't feel like I've missed anything. There are things I know I've needed to do, and by God they've gotten done, or at least attempted. Who could ask for more?

More Rough Edges notes

2007-03-11T08:06:00.000-03:00

7 - Prophet Sharing

This is a two-parter, written around 1989-1990. I spent the better part of a month parked on my couch with a back injury so I took the time to do some bible study. I headed for the minor prophets and got particularly interested in the book of Joel. The first half of this song is a rough paraphrase of Joel. I've noted that the old testament prophets were particularly fond of proclaiming woe; oh, woe unto thee, though stiff-necked and badly-dressed people. And so, the first half of this song is called "Woe, Nellie."

The second half is an extrapolation of the first half's warnings into the modern day. If you read Joel, he has a lot to say to us. About that time I learned that the word "secular" does not mean simply "without God" as I once thought, but instead "in the world." There's a lot of talk in Evangelical circles, and the contemporary Christian music community, about secularism. If this world truly belongs to Satan, then I am a spy for the other side.

This was one of the recordings that was hardest to include, and hardest to leave off. I'm particularly proud of this song (I suppose I should say, grateful) but am definitely not satisfied with the recording. I've been known to do it as a solo acoustic piece, but there's been a couple of opportunities to play it live with a band, and it comes off much better. Someday I'd like to record it that way.

8 - The Promise

This was written for a young man I knew who was having a very serious crisis of faith. I guess I offer it up as a prayer on his behalf. I'm pleased to report that, the last I knew, he was walking the walk.

As for the musical construction, this one's written on a guitar tuned to DADGAD. It's a tuning that Martin Carthy developed to help him better interperet Irish music for the guitar. The fingerstyle master Pierre Bensusan uses it a lot, as did the late Michael Hedges. With endorsements like that, how could I resist?

9 - A Voice

Pretty self-explanatory, lyrically. Musically, it's an acoustic guitar capoed on the fifth fret. I like the sound of it up there.

10 - Up

This was more or less an experiment to see what I could do with the sequencer and some tape speed adjustments. It's also some serious thought on the state of the world today.

11 - Wheels

This is one of my wife, Lynn's favorites. She especially likes the two overlapping synth patterns. This one's a tough one to do live, but we always have a lot of fun with it. Without the sequencer, I instead do a slapback-echo thing on the guitar, a la Edge of U2. Oftimes, the end of the song turns into an extended jam. Still, I think I prefer this version.

Link to Sweeney

2007-02-28T21:03:00.000-04:00

Hi.

Some of you got here via a link on my CD. There's another CD I'd like to draw your attention to. Most of the copies of both CDs have links to both pages, but some don't, so here it is.

http://tcsweeney.blogspot.com/

This will take you to information that goes with a CD called "The Ricochet Project" by T. C. Sweeney. TC was a very good friend of mine, who passed away early in 2002. These are among the best recordings of his own songs, and I am proud to have been a part of them. I hope you enjoy the blog, and the CD.

Some more from Rough Edges

2007-02-20T22:17:00.000-04:00

Hi. Doin' the Rough Edges CD back to front.

12 - Loser

Wrote this one in the late '80's for my wife, Lynn. She deserves an opera or something, but this is what I did. Sorry, honey. ;> Actually, I kind of like this song, or I wouldn't have included it. It's done solo with 1 acoustic guitar, tuned to a deep-C tuning

13 - F15 / Woodstock Nation

This is a two-part thing. F15 refers to a repeating rhythm pattern of 3 5's, into a riff and jam, and then cut away to a poem. The poem was written in Sacramento, CA late one night. California Public Television was running the movie "Woodstock" on its 15th anniversary, and it made me think of all the changes I'd been through since that time. The Woodstock Music and Arts Festival took place the weekend of my 14th birthday, and though I was not there, it had a profound effect on me.

I should also mention that the recording of this piece was different from the rest of the collection. This, like most of the rest of the CD, is me on guitar and vocals with the rest coming from a sequencer and synthesizers. Where as the others arranged this way were recorded piecemeal into a 4-track cassette deck, this one was done live, in stereo, into a home deck. Everything into my little 6-channel mixer and done live, in one take.

14 - BC-AD

I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior on March 14, 1984. The church I went to was a little house church in Sacramento, CA named Heart Ministries, which was a mission of a local Southern Baptist fellowship. By mid-April, there were five new believers who wanted to be baptized, including myself.

The Pastor, a dear friend named Jim Arnold who is now a missionary in Thailand, asked each of us to take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the center. On one side we should write "BC," and on the other, "AD." On it, we should write down what we thought of ourselves, what we perceived our friends and family thinking of us, and what we think God thought of us before accepting Christ and after. I took his idea a step further and wrote this song. I got to play it at my baptism on April 15, 1984.

When news breaks, we fix it!

2007-02-17T17:47:00.000-04:00

Clark Kent. That was my hero when I was a very small child. Not Superman, oh no. Superman was cool, all right. Being able to fly would be neat, eat bullets, pick up cars, walk through walls . . . Didn't they have doors on Krypton?

But it was Clark Kent who was the crusading journalist. He, along with Lois Lane and that little twerp Olson, exposed corruption and dragged it kicking and screaming out into the light. He was the one who rooted out the evidence that put the bad guys behind bars. He was the one who stood up for truth, justice, and the American way. Superman just mopped up the mess when the two dough-heads got into trouble.

That's why I wanted to be a journalist. I was, and am, idealistic, and I saw that as a way to fight for my ideals. Too bad it didn't work out that way. Oh, well.

What disappointed me was the real world of journalism. And, to be honest, it continues to do so. There are no Clark Kents, but there are many who see themselves that way. To be fair, corruption is a lot more complicated than it was for George Reeves.

One problem is the illusion of an unbiased source of news. There simply is no such thing. Truth, simple pure truth, nothing-but-the-facts truth, can be packaged and shaped in so many ways. This was questioned once by a friend of mine, who insisted that the newspaper that he preferred was unbiased. At that time, we happened to each have a copy of our favorite newspapers for that day on hand. There was a story that appeared in both, regarding what was seen as a congressional victory for President Bush. Both papers ran the exact same story, reprinting word for word what had been sent to them over the Associated Press wire. But, the paper that was perceived as more conservative ran the story on page 1, above the fold, with a rather large photo of Mr. Bush, smiling. The more liberal paper ran it on the back page of the first section, with no photo and a much smaller headline. You can draw your own conclusions.

Again, if journalism is supposed to be about reporting the truth, why not report the truth about the journalist? Why doesn't the New York Times come right out and say what their editorial stance is? Or the Washington times? CNN and Fox News should both shout their biases from the highest sattelite dish. It's not like nobody knows already, fer hevvin's sake.

One of the most celebrated journalists in American history was William Lloyd Garrison. He was one of the heroes of the emancipation, and is almost always referred to as the publisher of an "Abolitionist Newspaper." What does that mean? Was there nothing but abolitionist diatribes printed on its pages? They had no other stories? No court reports? No sports section? No funnies? If something happened in Boston, or Washington DC, they only reported the abolitionist aspects of the story? I would guess it was a newspaper much like any other newspaper. It was probably read by people who could have cared less about the abolition of slavery, and just wanted to know what was going on in the world. After all, a newspaper is a business that has to attract readers, or it will go out of business.

That brings us to the other major problem that I have with modern journalism; the lengths that a news source will go to in order to make money. The worst offenders are television journalists, and most of all the 24-hour news channels. When CNN was the only game in town, they actually did a very good job of showing the broader picture, and keeping their own fingers out of the mix. For the most part, I will admit that I like Fox News Channel, and certainly prefer their point of view, but there's a lot of times they fall far short of the mark.

The latest example is the death of Anna Nichole Smith. I agree that it is a significant event, especially considering all the controversy surrounding the circumstances, the estate, and the young child she left behind. Still, the facts would be easy to report, and updates even moreso. So why do CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC insist on talking about it practically all the time? Isn't there any other news in the world? Do these people know that there was a coup in Thailand recently? The only way I knew was that a friend of mine who's a missionary there told me in an email.

Trouble is, there isn't much money to be made talking about the Thailand coup. CNN tried an all-international-news channel a while ago, and it bombed. It was good, but not glamorous. Sometimes I think I learned more back when we saw the news for a half hour every evening. Back in the day, there were three networks, and we lived in a very rural area, and could only get two of them. The news would come on right about dinnertime, and Howard K. Smith or Frank Reynolds would run through the main stories of the day. If you wanted more detail, you picked up a paper.

It's why I continue to listen regularly to National Public Radio. They cover a wide range of topics, and do it in depth, and even leave out the commercials. There is a certain pattern that you have to get used to, though. It's rather annoying, really, but you have to put up with it if you want to hear about anything besides Anna Nichole Smith. It goes kind of like this:

1) There's a problem somewhere.

2) Several people tell heartfelt stories about the problem, and how it affects them.

3) It turns out that the government knows about the problem, and somebody is trying to get them to spend money to solve it.

4) Heinous, selfish, power-mad people in the government don't want to spend the money. Their side of the story is told by people who are fat, rich, old, and white. You can tell, even on the radio.

5) If you're really lucky, you'll get to hear how desperate the people with the problem are again.

But don't you DARE imply that National Public Radio is biased. Oh, no. Not Superman. Or CNN, or the Washington Times, or Manchester Union Leader, or Fox News, or the New York Times, or . . .

Rough Edges

2007-02-15T05:34:00.000-04:00

Hi. For the legion of PPLS readers out there (sound of crickets chirping) just want to say, sorry it took so long for me to stick more stuff on here. Those of you who have the Rough Edges CD were promised content here, and so here it is. And, since things show up here in the order they're posted, I should start with the end of the album.

Bob's Cliche City
East Chahunga Dragway
Limestone for Mayor

These are the last three cuts on the disc. They were made roughly 1989-1991 when I was a DJ at WPNH radio in Plymouth, NH. I used to work there one night a week, doing the overnight Friday show, and when they stopped broadcasting 24/7 the late night Saturday slot. Given the odd hour, I was pretty much free to do whatever I pleased. Mwahahahaha!!

So, I started doing my own fake commercials, which I mixed in with the real ones. And, this is three of them. I stuck them at the end so that you wouldn't have to suffer through them while listening to the music. By the way, I should mention that East Chahunga was an invention of Marcus Jennings, "the Doctor of Rock and Roll," one of WPNH's regular hosts. To be honest, I've forgotten his real name, but he was (and I'm sure, is) a great guy and an excellent DJ. He eventually got offered a better job in Buffalo, which is his home town. If you're out there, Doc, thanks for everything.

WPNH is still on the air, but it's now part of a conglomerate. The FM and AM signals are both satellited in from, I think, Boston. The building the studios used to be in was sold, and later torn down, and they've not had live on-air talent for ages now. Dirty little secret time: Back in the day, we used to say that the station's call letter stood for We Please No Human.

In The Beginning

2006-03-31T21:14:00.000-04:00

A dissertation of Progressive Rock.

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In the beginning was the Moody, and the Moody was prog, and the prog was Moody.

And there were many who drank from the well of prog; Sgt. Pepper, the Satanic Majesties, even the Boys of the Beach and the sounds of their pets. But for Moody, it ran as did the blood in his veins. Blue it ran, but not bluesy. Blue as nights in white satin into tuesday afternoon. To our children's children's children he sang until the seventh sojourn to the gemini dream.

And the Moody begat five children.

One was positive. Astral travelling from the south side of the sky, he was fragile and lived close to the edge. Though some threw tormatoes at him, he went for the one and used the keys to ascencion to climb the ladder and open our eyes. He plugged into the big generator and relayed to us the heart of the sunrise.

Another of the sons of Moody cried for elp. His condition required brain salad surgery, and he feared all nine karn evils. Still, he was a lucky man who still turns me on. Viewing a trilogy of pictures at an exhibition, he saw the hoedown between the sherrif and Benny the bouncer as a fanfare for the common man.

Still another aspired to be a King in crimson. He had the discipline, and was dealt a hand that could beat three of a perfect pair. But he was a 21st century schizoid man. In his courts they spoke elephant talk, but instead of red his clothing was starless and bible black.

Jethro was seen as a tull boy, just driving around in his four wheel drive (low ratio) and singing songs from the wood. And yet, those who knew him well found him deep enough to require an aqualung and as heavy as horses. He would stand up and freely pass the cup of crimson wonder for the benefit of all, even honoring the crest of a knave and the minstrels in his gallery. If only he could have done something about his locomotive breath.

The last wished to be first. "What shall you call me?" he laughed. "Anything but late for supper." He spent his days dancing the foxtrot and singing nursery crymes. He was even accused of selling England by the pound. He tooted the angel's trumpet until he had his phil. In the end, there was nothing left but his invisible touch.

And the five sons of Moody begat children of their own. From Kansas to Boston to Asia and even across the Styx they journeyed on gentle giant camels from star castle to dream theatre, carrying the King's X and drinking deeply of the nektar. From atop salem hill they were divine in sight of America Gommorah.

And Moody, now a great grandfather, said "Lovely to see you again, my friends."