The Greatest Guitar Player in the World

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

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

>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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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!

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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

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

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

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

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.