once weekly,
usually on Saturdays
Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say, and instead it’s open mike night. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.
8/23/2025
Anything Goes #42
92 responses to “Anything Goes #42”
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John Mayall, British bluesman and band leader, died a year ago at 90. Besides teaching Eric Clapton and about 100 other musicians how to contribute to a band, Mayall wrote dozens of wonderful songs and was, in the view of many including me, the conscience of the Rock Generation. I couldn’t find a live version of one of my favorite Mayall-written and sung songs, “Accidental Suicide”, but here’s an audio version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc1Za5jKI68
jtb
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I don’t remember many “just say no” songs except some garbage funded by DARE. This ain’t garbage. Rocks, actually. “Don’t let me sound like I’m standing here preaching you a sermon” — well, it does sound sermonesque, but who has more insight to see the dangers of drugs than rock stars?
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This certainly isn’t a “just say no” song. I can’t put my finger on the exact quote, but Mayall, who was in many, many bands had a rule about rehearsals and performances which I recall as, “If you can’t play your best stoned, don’t show up stoned. If you play better stoned, just make sure you’re playing in the same key as the rest of the band.”
What the hell. Mayall smoked weed when it was illegal everywhere, and didn’t tell any of his bands to stay off drugs. But he preferred that they stay on key.
John
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> Well, I want to say a thing or two regarding Jimmy Hendrix
> It seems to be a case of accidental suicide
> But out of all the sadness they stopped to hear the warning
> He had an overdose and never knew the way he died
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> Drugs may bring you joy, but the danger there’s that they destroy
> So watch what you do or you can be the next to go
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> Don’t let me sound like I’m standing here preaching you a sermon
> When everybody has to find a way to ease the strain
> No one but you has control enough to check confusion
> You gonna need your mind clear before you get to change the world
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> Drugs may bring you joy, but the danger there’s that they destroy
> So watch what you do or you can be the next to goMaybe he said that pithy line about staying on key, but he didn’t say it in the song. That’s a “just say no” song. Nancy Reagan would sing along on the chorus.
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Oh, man, I just erased a half hour’s worth of writing and I don’t have the strength to recreate it, so I’ll summarize. The counterculture, of which I was one, differentiated between “hard drugs” and “recreational drugs”. Most everybody who heard that song knew that Mayall was talking about heroin and other drugs on which one could fairly easily overdose, on the one hand, as opposed to weed and low-end speed and other “soft” drugs on the other. Cocaine and alcohol were somewhere in the middle, which is why Mayall didn’t start listing drugs. Hell, he was writing song lyrics, not creating drug policy. He certainly wasn’t saying “just say no” to marijuana. Virtually everyone in his band smoked dope.
This might be a “be careful of hard drugs” song, but Nancy Reagan was including soft drugs and Mayall would never do that.
A final note: There’s one guy from John’s band still alive, and he has a blog. He says they smoked dope all the time after performances. He says more, but I gotta go.
John
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Anything more than a paragraph or two max, I do my writing off-line, then paste it to the internet (or don’t, if it sucks, which is about 1/3 of the time). Still I mourn over the occasional one or two paragraphs lost, and of course offer my condolences for your half hour.
It’s been my experience (YMMV) that only users make the distinctions between soft drugs, hard drugs, and in-between drugs. To the non-users and bluenoses, like Nancy R or my parents, doing even the weakest stale pot is **DOING DRUGS OH MY GOD**. But sure, I see the distinction. I’m a softie myself, like our man Mayall.
Always eager to find a new blog if it’s worth reading, so please, do tell!
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THIS is an anti-hard drug song. Yeah, I know, but listen again: really close to a perfect live performance.
John
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Surely, surely, though, he’s smoked plenty of weed?
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I honestly don’t know. He was on the road for 40 years, including three years with Dylan. After he left Dylan, he started his own band and has had it since – maybe 45 years. The players have changed some, but not as much as you’d think. He and his wife founded and owned a violin repair and tuning shop in Delaware for a few years. He has written something like 50 songs that have been published. He has made it an ethical point not to try to get wealthy. My guess would be not plenty, but certainly some. The guy just has a pleasant voice, even at 80, and an ear that supports multiple simultaneous harmonies. He would be more likely to eat weed than to smoke it.
I once made a batch of weed brownies that put one of my roommates in the hospital. I didn’t realize how little he had smoked grass nor how good my weed was. The secret is to dry-pan fry the weed until there’s a little puff of smoke, then dump it in the brownie mix. I made the mix leaner after the hospital incident.
jtb
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Mari j wanna can be a surprisingly powerful drug. I don’t think I wrote about it, but my first experience with legal edibles here in Washington was damned near an overdose. Like an idiot, I ate it like candy & it took a while but I’ve never been so high, and I didn’t care for it. The candy part was good, though.
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The same thing happened to me when I tried edibles. My homemade edibles were pretty powerful, but I didn’t expect the State cookies to pack a punch. I drove up to the store for some munchies, and I wasn’t entirely sure I could drive back home. I finally did, but I don’t think I’ve tried the legal stuff since. I can do the math — the right occasion just hasn’t presented itself.
jtb
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Huh. And I thought it was just me being kind of a wuss.
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David toured with Jerry Jeff Walker (who wrote Mr. Bojangles) for nearly five years, so they played this song every night. David said he never got tired of it, partly because Jerry Jeff wrote backup cords that took six fingers to play. In any case, David almost always sings Mr. Bojangles as his encore song, and here he is. The sound isn’t perfect and the audience is murmuring, so if you have a pair of cans, that would help. Otherwise, just turn up the volume. And watch his left hand play some of those six finger chords. Note his explanation of the distinction between a minstrel show and a medicine show. A nice song and a free history lesson. My man, David Bromberg. . .
John
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I grew up with that song, and always thought it was a golden oldie even then. It feels like the ’30s more than the ’60s, but in a good way, of course.
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Just to be clear, I use the word “cans” to denote any type of speaker that is placed adjacent to your ears. I have a medium quality pair of Koss headphones that entirely cover each ear, and have separate balance and volume controls. They cost more than my computer because sound is important to me. So when I say “cans” I mean, among other things, headphones. Even low cost headphones can sound pretty good and keep the world away while Rick Nelson or Bob Dylan is crooning.
John
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Ah, I didn’t know that about cans. Thought it meant headphones.
My cheap headphones aren’t even as good as my cheap speakers, now that the speakers are right by my head. But they’re all cans.
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This can’t possibly matter, but I don’t want to lead you astray. Cans DO mean headphones. “Cans” used to mean super high-end Koss (and a couple of other brands) that sealed to the head. “Cans” has COME to mean any decent pair of headphones. Context is everything. If you’re in the control room of a first-rate recording studio, “Cans” revert to the former definition. If you’re home and there’s a lot of ambient noise, somebody might say, “Just wear cans.” Meaning decent headphones. Headphone technology has evolved to the point where a dozen or more manufacturers now make really good headphones. Most people call these “cans”.
John
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Facts matter, and words matter, and I like getting both right when I can.
I have speakers about eight inches from my head. They’re not headphones. Can they be cans?
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No, those are speakers. But if they deliver subtle sound, that will work well enough. I’m sorry, but my knowledge of headphones is 40 years old. My Sis ask what I wanted for my birthday and I said, “A pair of Koss cans. Not the top of the line…somewhere in the middle, likely high two digits. Sis always finds sales online, so I don’t know what she paid. I hope I’m being helpful and not being a pain in the ass. Buying online precludes your test driving them. A digital signal is a digital signal, so if they sound good in the store, they’ll probably sound good with your existing PC. Just make sure the connectors match the jack.
Borrow a pair from one of your brothers, and if they fit in the jack headphone outlet on your system, you can take them into a discount store and show them the jack.
Caution: You probably care more about the spoken word than the sung one. I care about the difference between early Bob Dylan mono and stereo. You might not. Comment me back if I’ve wandered off the subject. I do that sometimes accidentally.
John
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If you buy a set of headphones, be sure the jack is the same as your speaker jack(s). Unless you have a separate output for headphones, and I don’t think you do.
John
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I bought headphones, el cheapo, but was only interested in volume and maybe covering my ears to the ambient noise. When Brando whispers something to Bogart, I need to hear it even when the fans are roaring full blast.
My new non-Koss $8 headphones didn’t help. The sound is louder and clearer from the non-cans a foot from my face, than from the headphones over my ears. And the speaker is the size of my fist, so when Brando whispers I simply pick it up and hold it to my ear like cans.
$8 headphones, my ass.
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Everybody has his/her (I refuse to use “their”) priorities; we should certainly respect those choices and honor the associated priorities. You live in proximity to some alleged homo sapiens who speak loudly of sauces and other hobbies. I entirely understand why you’d want to avoid hearing, nonstop, the saucy details. Eight bucks sounds like a bargain to accomplish that.
Music is recorded by players sitting on folding chairs. There are likely more musicians playing on any song than you would guess. The late and slightly crazy Phil Spector is partially to largely responsible for the size of the crowd a record producer gathers together to record a song. Half the musicians are there to create what the audiophiles call “presence” rather than melody. Phil called it a “wall of sound”.
Before each session, each folding chair is opened and closed, and the squeaky ones are sent downstairs for maintenance or, at least, oil. From among the foreground and background sounds the musicians are creating, your headphones should be able to pick up and transmit to your brain the squeak of a folding chair or the squeak of an almost-but-not-quite-perfectly blown clarinet that is just droning to create presence. That’s why the producer hired a clarinetist.
These things are only a consideration — not a mandate. But I assert that there IS fun to be had inside the sonic details.
jtb
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Never thought about the folding chairs and the squeak test. Love learning new things like that, things I’d never pondered that make sudden sense soon as they’re explained. I appreciate the ongoing education.
I ain’t questioning the fun to be found in sonic details. Like cribbage or soap operas or even football, the fun is absolutely there, no doubt, just not for me. All I want from music is to hear it without wishing I wasn’t hearing it, and maybe a tune I can carry around and whistle later.
Someone said music is mathematics. Do you buy that?
And also, why refuse to use “their”? I hesitated for a while, but he/she him/her his/hers is so clunky on the tongue and mind, I’ve started easing myself into the newfangled use of they and their. After a bit of awkwardness, it no longer makes my mind stumble, and it’s begun sounding simply right.
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The college lit professors tell their charges that language is an evolving thing, then tell other charges that Hunter Thompson was abusing the language by intermingling denotation and connotation. Of course language evolves — the evidence abounds. I read a fair amount of fiction from the 1930s — reasonably close to a century ago — and some words have expanded or reduced their denotation while others have changed with the culture. In the U.S. alone, as women, black folks and other racial and ethnic minorities, geriatrics like me, and many other pissed off people have kicked down the locked doors of discrimination, the language we use to describe them has evolved because — and this is, I think important — so-called minorities aren’t seeking equal opportunity because they are equal: They are rightfully claiming their very differences make us all stronger together. And in this claim, history strongly supports their argument.
So I’m probably wrong to use his/her (even though internal language rules imply I’m right). Emerging cultural norms separate gender from sex and suggest that there might be more than two genders. We won’t live to see the outcome of that tussle — maybe nobody will if the strongarm/weakmind Presidency perpetuates — but inclusion should beat the crap out of propriety. (I use five fucking words — “beat the crap out of — to avoid typing “trump”). Life goes on, but not forever.
John
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His/her, as I recall perhaps incorrectly, was itself an evolution of the language, back in the ’70s. The old coots of that era found his/her clumsy and thought it sounded wrong, and they were right, but we’ve gotten so used to it that now we claim it as proper English. They and their will make the same slow progress.
Yup, I’ve also seen the change of a word’s meaning in an old novel, or the change of pronunciation in an old movie. Give it long enough and the language changes so much it’s a barrier to the work, like me and Shakespeare.
Use of the lower-case verb trump will never recover. Here’s hoping the meaning of the word evolves, and it becomes a synonym for bullshit.
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I lived my whole life up until today without hearing this version of one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite songwriters. I don’t know what to do with it so I’m putting it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xXvZ3f7Z1A
Townes Van Zandt: Nothing (Private Concert at a Holiday Inn in Houston, apparently)
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It isn’t Townes’ fault that 15 country superstars with checking accounts and ranches decided to cover this song. It is ubiquitous, but still one of a kind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zprRZ2wFQD4
John
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You will not be surprised that I prefer the studio version, but dang me that’s a great song.
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Wikipedia, which I’ve found to be pretty damn reliable, says, Davis “was ordained as a Baptist minister in Washington, North Carolina, in 1933”. Black institutions, especially in the South and especially during the Depression, didn’t have time to fuck around with a bunch of formalities, so I can’t tell you on what basis Rev. Davis was ordained or who ordained him. In any case, Rev. Davis is remembered primarily as a guitar player and especially as a teacher of other guitar players.
John
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I’m surprised you’ve heard the studio version. Townes recorded it on a fairly obscure album in 1972. Maybe it’s somewhere on the Web, but it didn’t sell millions of copies, although it should have. I’m actually surprised at the high quality of this version. It was also recorded on albums of about 70 C&W and Americana singers, so Townes did see some revenue from the song which he promptly signed over to one or seven of his drug dealers. It was remarkable that Townes made it to 52.
John
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Shoot me for this sacrilege, but I sought out some Rev Gary Davis music, and prefer it when he doesn’t sing.
It’s remarkable that any of us have made it as far and as long as we have. It’s just dumb luck ain’t it? Certainly for me, it’s a coincidence, not an accomplishment.
Lefty, of course, was working for the feds. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Damned rare is the person who wouldn’t sell out their friends and principles.
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I can’t shoot you because I wouldn’t own a gun. Rev Davis is important because he was significantly responsible for integrating Black American Blues into the mainstream of American music and creating rock and roll, and, finally, when mixed with western, bluegrass, pop, and the sudden ubiquity of the electric guitar, rock. It was the emotive nature of his singing that helped create The Beatles — not its quality.
John
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Thanks for not shooting me. I’ve been told it might be a good idea to get a gun, because trouble’s coming. And trouble *is* coming, but it’ll find me unarmed, too.
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This is a reply to Doug’s comment about the verb “trump” above, but there’s no reply room there.
The verb “trump” will continue to be used in Bridge and other card games in which there is a preferential suit in each hand. I took Bridge lessons for a year and a half, and just scratched the surface of the damn game.
jtb
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Change the terminology or I’m giving up bridge.
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I can’t listen to these until tonight — too loud with the fans going, and too hot to turn ’em off — but there’ll be music after twilight.
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“Nuthin’” is new to me, and sweet jeebers I love the bleakness. Thanks for sharing this!
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Apropos of nearly nothing, the very loud fans in my room plus the very soft-spoken intro by Mr VZ have finally motivated me to spend fifteen minutes rejiggering my sound system. The speakers are now next to my head in the recliner, instead of five feet away by the screens, and —holy moly I can hear again, doc!
Let’s celebrate with one of my favorite songs, Al Newman’s It’s a Gas. Sure, it’s not as deep as Townes Van Zandt, but neither am I.
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Whatever meager cultural literacy I acquired between 1960 and 1965 I got from Mad Magazine. Obviously an overstatement, but not by much.
jtb
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Mad was probably an enormous influence on my formative years, though I didn’t know it at the time. I just thought it was funny. Mad’s underlying philosophy was Make Fun of Everything, and I’m Doug Holland and I approve this message.
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David toured with Jerry Jeff Walker (who wrote Mr. Bojangles) for nearly five years, so they played this song every night. David said he never got tired of it, partly because Jerry Jeff wrote backup cords that took six fingers to play. In any case, David almost always sings Mr. Bojangles as his encore song, and here he is. The sound isn’t perfect and the audience is murmuring, so if you have a pair of cans, that would help. Otherwise, just turn up the volume. And watch his left hand play some of those six finger chords. Note his explanation of the distinction between a minstrel show and a medicine show. A nice song and a free history lesson. My man, David Bromberg. . .
John
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jesus, i can’t even get my story up here without a 24 hour wait?
is it approved yet?
silly that i care i guess-
This software wasn’t architected to support conversations, but rather, comments. So when I attempt to reply to Doug, the software tells me I’m coming too soon. I’m not claiming to be perfect, but in my single days (and for that matter, in my married days) I never had that complaint. I’m not saying I never had complaints — just that I never had THAT complaint. At my current age, it sometimes takes a fortnight, including the begging and several trips to the loo.
My guess is that this is a feature that “came” with the latest release of the comment software. Doug would have notified us had he been aware of it. When the software shuts me down, I just amble over to another blog and comment away. The problem is, of course, that Douglas is more welcoming than most blog proprietors. I’m sure this will, like my periodic evacuations, work itself out.
I’ve not experienced a full 24-hour comment delay: more like a half hour, I’d say. I don’t find fault with this policy. Most blogs would improve with a diversity of comments.
John
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Eel, there is nothing from you in any queue here.
John, there’ve been no updates.
Comments appear within half an hour or so. Comments with images or more than two links are held for manual approval, which can take hours. Other than that, all systems are go, so far as I know. Hit me with a bug report, and I’ll squish it or insecticide it.
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Dougles, my brother: On at least a half dozen occasions over the last two weeks, I’ve submitted a comment, forgotten something because my brain is 75, and submitted another comment and received the message (sorry, only approximate, should have written it down) “Slow down. You’re commenting too fast.”. The comment stays alive on my machine, and a half hour later I resubmit it and it usually goes through. That’s the message I thought the resident skin philosopher was referring to, and, as usual, while trying to be helpful I probably confused him, you, and myself. I have to believe you installed a software update about two weeks ago, or that your software auto-updated then.
I remember the message fairly accurately because when I wore a younger man’s clothes a woman or two said very similar words to me in a slightly different context. I’ve lost 77 pounds since my heart attack, so it’s entirely possible that those clothes would fit me again, but I sold them and part of my heart to the ragman.
jtb
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I rent the software, have no interest in writing it, but I’m willing to put some slight effort into troubleshooting problems. Fifteen minutes of research tells me the culprit’s a filter designed to prevent “comment flood,” which is when spammers blast comment after comment in no time flat. Comment too quickly, you get that error message, “Slow down. You’re commenting too fast.”
Which seems unnecessarily rude to me, especially cuz I’ve been publishing for years and seen plenty of spam, without ever seeing a “comment flood.” So fuck it, I’ve disabled that filter, or at least tried to.
Feel free to test drive it.
I still have my younger man’s clothes, but they’re stained and ripped.
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I still have many of my old shirts, and the pockets of many of them are torn at the top where a cigarette pack always resided, and virtually all of them have cigarette burns resulting from a combination of Jim Beam and a pack and a half a day. I have no idea why I retained the shirts. I do very little greasy work, and I’m always in the closet looking for a shirt that’s not smoke/Beam damaged. It’s been several hours since I last commented, so I think I’m number one on the runway.
John
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i save everything, i have 19 coats and jackets, so many shirts my closet is jammed,
i don’t need half that, less, but am incapable of getting rid of it…
too much stuff and have written a few stories called Stuff…
still alive at 75
even with the fags
hey i’m catching up at 71-
Well, technically I only made it to 66. The last nine years have been smoke free, and I’m running out of breath. The cardio guys say they can’t do any more work, although they’ve tried. My vascular system looks a lot like a Lewis Carroll puzzle. It will solve itself within the next year. I try to make every day count. Sometimes they count two or three times.
John
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I would not have guessed you a smoker and Beamer, even ex-, and it messes with my mental image of John the Basket. Please tell me you never wore an STP jacket.
Whether you did or didn’t or even if you’re wearing one now, I hope you’re the younger man whose clothes older John will be wearing in another ten years. Make it a Jerry Lewis Carroll puzzle.
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You gotta remember that I started smoking when smoking didn’t cause cancer and heart disease. Yeah, it was that long ago. During the anti-Vietnam-War marches, I wore an armband and was given authority to send anyone home who was destroying property with the ubiquitous rocks along the way. No, no STP jacket. Just an STW sweatshirt (stop the war). Ever been to an AA meeting? Me neither, but the journey from being a drinking person to being a non-drinking person is arduous and maddening. Had my last drink about 30 years ago. Martha helped.
I’m just a singer in a rock and roll band, like everybody else. I’ve fucked up and had to un-fuck up.
John
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Good on you for quitting. I’ve always been a quitter, just ask my mum and she’ll explain why I never amounted to anything.
Smoking: Two or three puffs when I was ten was enough for me. “You have to get used to it,” some kid said, and I don’t know what I said back but I was thinking, “Why?”
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Jeez, the demographics on this page must be worse than Fox News (median age, 65), but the quality of the readers is better.
I don’t really do ‘clothes’ any more, I guess. My closet is inaccessible behind the clutter, so I cycle through the same few sweatpants and t-shirts, and launder them when they start to stink.
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oh, maybe i forgot to press Post Comment
but I doubt it-
Wellll, what do you think happened?
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Okay, I’ll try again…
Back in the high school years Dave was the first one of our loose group of friends who had his own apartment. I had heard that Jenny, his sweet blond teenage bride, was fucking Dave’s friends too. I went over one day when Dave was gone and Jenny was alone with the kids. Like, what about me? That nubile lassie got on top, took control and rode me into delirious pleasure, still memorable. (At least one of us knew what they were doing.) Looking up at her blond hair, cute breasts and smile I experienced the singular joy of having a girl ride me to oblivion, maybe my second lay. (Still one of the top two sexsational experiences.)
Cut to 54 years later and I reconnect with Dave, we text and talk sometimes and he seems somewhat envious that I lived the backwoods hippie life while he was rearing three kids after Jenny disappeared. Finally, after a couple years I said, “Hey did you know that all of your friends were fucking Jenny back then?”
“No,” he said, “but it doesn’t surprise me.”
Yeah, we’re still friends…
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Where’s Jenny, I wonder, and what was in her head then, and now?
Must be my puritanical upbringing, but even as a horny high school boy I don’t think I’d boink a friend’s wife. Then again, no friend’s wife ever offered, so that’s easy to say. Your stories make me wonder what experiences such hesitation has deprived me of.
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“Jenny” showed up years later to see Dave and her kids, drunk, an uncomfortable scene…
She died young…(What was in her head? She loved sex, I guess…)
I would never have tried that, except all Dave’s friends were doing it, soooooo…
We all have regrets like your last sentence, if only we’d at least suggested it what’s the worse thing, a solid NO!?
Yet possible rejection is a powerful influence…
Puritanical, you? When did you first masturbate? I’d guess 10 maybe?
Me, 19, and only by accident, what the fuck?!-
> What was in her head? She loved sex, I guess…
If I was young and female and attractive (but still had my male mind & testosterone-soaked outlook) I would be the biggest slut lesbian when ever spread her legs. Most females don’t seem to think that way, though.
Fear of rejection is so very stupid, but without that fear I would’ve asked a thousand women out, lived a very different life I wouldn’t want, and probably died of syphilis in my early 30s.
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once i said to my mother,
“You didn’t rear me bad,
you didn’t rear me, period.”
loosy goosy liberal messy house,
once walked in on my parents,
you ever do that?
i knew where my father’s high brow
dirty books were, once he called me in,
and i walked into his bedroom with
Lady Chatterly’s Lover in my hand…-
If you’re open to requests, I’d like to hear about your non-rearing. My fam had the messy house, but nothing was loosy goosy or liberal, and I can’t hardly imagine it.
My pop read sci-fi, always and almost only, but I did find a smut novel under his mattress once. Speaking of, is Lady Chatterly’s Lover any good? Readable? Many of the classics aren’t.
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Lady C L might be still good, though I watched Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy again about 6 years ago and couldn’t get into them as well 50 years later…
Family life, pretty tense, taught to write off anyone who said nigger, so few friends in the racist corn fields of Indiana, I suppose i could give an excerpt or two from my memoirs…
Just a stressed up upbringing…parents fighting, father dealing with severe job challenges and depression…
Ideally i wish I’d had an older brother to tell me what to do with women, took me till i was 38 to finally get a clue, about the clitoris etc…
From memoirs:
“I was lucky enough to have a high school sweetheart, or major crush, and I guess she was freaky enough to like me too…
She invited me to go skinny-dipping in a little pond near her house behind Lindenwood College under the TV towers at the edge of town. She had that long frizzy hair, a big smile, and cute teenage tits. We floated out in the water holding onto opposite sides of an old tire for awhile as we talked and gazed at each other, so innocent I didn’t know what to do with her.
Lissa and I arranged to have a sleep-over at Patti McMahon’s house. Patti’s’ morbidly obese mother was one of those parents who let her kid do anything, like smoke cigarets and have friends overnight. Lissa and I had each told our parents we would be somewhere else and we met on the living room floor naked on our sleeping bags, two virgins wanting to do it.
I was clueless and had never heard of the words foreplay or clitoris. (What’s that? Where’s that?) Did I kiss her? Talk to her? Touch her? No, I just clumsily tried to mount her like an animal, I can still see her alarmed expression as she squirmed away, and we were still virgins in the morning. “
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That, sir, is a sweet remembrance, and what I like ti read — the glimpse into someone else’s head and life and memories.
Inquiring minds want to know, where was Patti while you were naked with Lissa?
I’ve heard tales about parents who let their kids do anything, but never knew such a family myself. My own parents were the opposite, basically letting their kids do nothing, until 5 out of 6 kids started breaking the rules. Curiously and to their credit, though Mom & Pop were conservative Republicans, we were also taught to disassociate from folks who spouted open racism.
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This isn’t a reply. This is a story about the Rev Gary Davis and a rendition of Maple Leaf Rag by David Bromberg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zprRZ2wFQD4
jtb
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This, kind sir, is the same link you shared yesterday, but it’s good again.
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My apologies, and I was damn near dead solid sober. It is startling that I’ve not had an alcoholic drink since about 1995. Turns out I had already consumed my share. OK, it was Martha’s idea, but she made a powerful argument. I don’t think the actual link is broken but it is certainly lost.
0308 on a dark Friday morning at the end of a 12 hour shift.
jtb
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I love a good mystery. Maybe this was it?
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Yup, that’s it. Listen closely. Guitar strings squeak and moan. Bromberg plays clean. Just the notes and nothing but the notes. There are a lot of pretty famous guitarists who couldn’t play MLR without a squeak. He has always been a musician’s musician. That’s why Dylan paid him above scale and Jerry Jeff paid him what he could.
John
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Without squeaks! I’d listened before you posted your comment, but hadn’t noticed the squeaklessness, which I love. The squeak of a guitar is usually a low-key annoyance, always making me wonder why otherwise excellent guitarists are content to squeak through their performances. I am seriously impressed!
But I know nothing of Rev Gary Davis.
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It’s a long story, and you would fall asleep with the entire context. Briefly, Rev Gary Davis was a progenitor of the Piedmont Blues, that branch of the blues that worked its way from the American southeast all the way to New York City during the 20th century. If you think of him as a teacher whose blues style gave life to David Bromberg, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, and many black blues players and singers who neither of us has heard much of, you’d be on the right track. He became a guitar teacher and schooled many of the guitarists who brought us the 60s and 70s.
He died in 1972, having lived longer than I have so far. Serious players took exhaust-choked Greyhound busses to New York and everywhere else the Rev lived to learn how to play the blues like he did. He did all that and more, blind from about age 3.
jtb
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So was he actually a Reverend, or is it bullshit like Tom Parker being ‘Colonel’? Hope it’s bullshit.
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my latest:
Alcohol
I bought beer for the first time in three years last week thinking it would be good to have on hand for any soft gallery openings. Now I’ve got this fat 12-pack in the fridge, hundred degree days, and wouldn’t it be nice to have a beer, glass of wine, shot of tequila or a whiskey? I have a big unopened bottle of Makers Mark bought three or four years ago but it would be crazy to get a bottle of Patrone tequila, right? (I’ve supposedly quit drinking but this year I’ve already drank about six glasses of wine, and would like another, only abstaining because of the sleep effects…)Yes all this Fugs talk, I had their albums, loved their rude crude lewd lyrics, obviously, and then came David Peel And The Lower East Side, loved that…
Photo: One of my trimmers, earlier today you saw her nipple, the day I came back from a walk and she had drunk 7 shots of tequila, took so many pics my camera literally broke in all the excitement, have i posted that story yet, the night i kissed her taint then left her, Bukowski would have plowed right in, damn…
For once i did the “right thing” Doug and she lives in my memory as an occasional fantasy…
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Oh, sudden sadness, I do hope I haven’t spoken of doing the right thing. That’s for each of us to decide for ourselves, and my apologies if I’ve dangled my right thing in front of you.
Once upon a time I kept a sixpack of beer in the fridge. Almost never do I drink the stuff, but my intent was to have it ready to offer if someone came over and wanted one. Imagine how long ago this must’ve been, that people sometimes came over to my place, and I allowed them inside! And then once, it actually happened. Like a good host I handed a cold brewski to a quasi-friend, who took a sip and came close to puking. That’s when I learned that beer goes bad, or ‘skunky’, after some years in the can. Which sure surprised me. Root beer don’t do that.
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This site, although originating in Seattle, doesn’t have a lot of Seattle history, and that’s OK: the site serves the cadre of contributors who share a cultural history which is not limited to a geographical setting: But sixty years ago and more, going back to the dawn of the 1950s, Seattle and Portland shared a troupe of professional wrestlers who put on a hell of a show. Although the troupe was headquartered in Portland, Oregon, they had a regular Saturday night extravaganza at a Seattle arena, broadcast on Seattle TV channel 7, KIRO, and hosted by Ron Forsell and others, and featuring such wrestling characters as Billy White Wolf, “The Outlaw” (Dory Funk, Jr.), Tony Borne, Roddy Piper, Dutch Savage, Jimmy Snuka, Shag Thomas, Buddy Rose, and many, many others.
At 6:30 on Saturday nights, before my parents went out for the evening, Dad and I would turn on KIRO for an hour of “Northwest Championship Wrestling”, always cheering the good guys and hissing the bad guys (the guys who couldn’t seem to play by the rules). One of the good guys, Billy White Wolf, was said to be Native American, although he looked pretty European to me. But when a bad guy cheated against him he would finally lose his cool and go into the “Indian War Dance” which inevitably led to the administration of the tomahawk chop (and even the double tomahawk chop) and the cheating opponent being counted out 1-2-3.
Does anybody else remember this troupe of players who decorated our Saturday nights on KIRO?
John
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Very vaguely I remember the show, but Saturdays and Sundays at 6 was Star Trek on channel 11, so I never watched the big-time wrestling myself. Knew a few kids who did, and always there was chatter about it t school, of course. Every so slightly I remember Ron Forsell, and of course Roddy Piper was briefly a movie star.
At my first fast-food job, age 16, a co-worker was trying to be a pro wrestler, competing every second weekend and then coming in make shakes and fries and complain about the pain. His back got so badly clobbered, he winced when he walked for months. Pro wrestling is fake, but the athleticism is real. And the risk.
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Here we go again with the age difference. The heyday of Northwest Championship Wrestling was before Star Trek. Star Trek premiered in 1964 and wasn’t in weekend reruns until several years later. You missed some fine wrasslin.
jtb
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Surprising myself, I remember a few of these names, especially The Grappler.
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I’ve probably commented this YouTube cut before, maybe in 2022 or 1911, but it’s worth seven minutes of your time to hear Jake Shimabukuro and three of his closest friends cover Jimi Hendrix with “If 6 was 9”. Yeah, sorry about the YouTube; maybe one day I’ll learn how to navigate. I set off for the New World and landed in Hawaii. If you’re a Hendrix junkie like me, you’ll hear a half dozen places where Jake acknowledges the writer and first performer of this fine song. Jake is coming to Seattle in September, but I don’t know whether he can afford to bring the other three remarkable musicians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmn8rBXONr8
jtb
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I’m not a Hendrix junkie, and don’t even know the song, but it’s fine. If you’re feeling professorial, what’s with his tiny geetar?
Says here Shimabukuro is coming to Federal Way on Sept 16, and bringing bassist Jackson Waldhoff. The cheapest seat is $50, which rules me out, but my hatred of crowds would rule me out even if tix were free.
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The “little guitar” is a ukulele, native to Hawaii, and developed in the 19th century. Jake is using “effect pedals” which turn the uke into a digital instrument. Ukulele effect pedals are relatively new. Uke players who wanted to create digital effects started using guitar effects pedals maybe 20 years ago, and now there are effects pedals made especially for ukes.
The ukulele has four strings, while the guitar has six and, although the uke looks like a little guitar, the tuning and playing styles are pretty different between the two instruments. Jake is considered to be one of the top uke players in the world, although uke purists might grade him down for his use of effects pedals. The idea of covering Hendrix (and covering him well) on the uke was considered close to outrageous before Jake came along.
jtb
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Maybe the only ukuleles I’ve seen were toys? Seems bigger than those, but maybe it’s an optrickal illusion. So how do a uke squeeze seven notes out of four strings?
By coincidence, at this very moment I’m watching Elvis play the ukulele in an old movie…
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The same way a guitar gets several octaves worth of notes out of six strings: the fretboard. Each fret toward the body is a half note up, each fret away from the body is a half note down. The G-string only plays G when 1) the instrument is properly tuned and 2) when you’re not shortening it by depressing the string between frets.
jtb
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You really do know this stuff. Do you uke?
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No. The only stringed/fretted instrument I’ve ever played is the cello, and that was in grade school. I took piano lessons for a while, and never learned to play competently. I played the cornet for a few years, but was never quite good enough to make first cornet. If you’re not first anything, you’re never going to play the melody, and that seems to require practice. I blow and draw on the harmonica a little, but that’s because my Dad was a fine harmonica player. I’m not. My brothers-in-law got ahold of an old army bugle, and were blowing into it to see if it worked. It didn’t. They gave it to me and I played taps, so I guess I still have my embouchure. I’ll note here that there’s not a lot of call for embouchure.
It’s four in the morning
The end of September
I’m writing this now
Just to see if you’re better
New York is cold
But I like where I’m living
There’s music on Clinton Street
All through the evening.That’s from memory. I probably missed a word or three. Just finished a 13 hour shift and I’m goofy.
John
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They old folks used to say, teach a kid an instrument and they’ll appreciate music all their lives. You buy that? You think it’s the lessons when you were a kid, cello piano cornet and maybe Dad’s harmonica, that made you a music man?
I wanted trumpet lessons, but it involved buying a trumpet so my pop said no. He thought I’d give up in six months, and the trumpet would rust in a box for the rest of our lives, and maybe he was right. So I never played an instrument, and never developed into much of a music man. I hum and whistle and tap my toes, but barely know Jerry Garcia from Itzhak Perlman. Jerry’s the fat one, right?
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Yeah, toward the end.
I suspect the two are unrelated. Had I gained competency on any instrument, maybe, but I didn’t. I performed in my school talent show on piano, but it was a pretty easy piece, and I practiced the hell out of it.
More importantly, I listen to a lot of music and I read about musicians. And I was born in just the right year. Elvis appeared when I was 5 or 6. Dylan released Freewheelin’ when I was 13. The Beatles conquered America when I was 14. I’m exactly the right age to get way inside Rock. And my parents gave me the gift of curiosity. Quizzes at dinner every night, and Dad made them fun. Never about music, mostly about science and geography, but curiosity is self-replicating.
A guitar player plucks a string of a guitar and a note of music is created. He depresses a string in the second fret, and the next higher tone comes from the guitar. Wow, how and why? Why are some chords resonant and some dissonant? Why do some chords make me feel happy and some make me feel sad? Music is as old as language. How can we not satiate our curiosity about it?
And once you get inside it, there’s no escape. Playing an instrument well is partly genetic and partly hard work. I guess I don’t have the genes, and I’m certainly lazy. Virtually every terrific guitar player practiced in their youth until their fingers bled. I just didn’t have that level of commitment.
John
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That was horseshit, and your Dad probably knew it was horseshit. My school had a few musical instruments laying around, waiting to lend them to an interested student (it was an average public school). Also, every music shop in Tacoma rents instruments by the month, and it’s not very expensive. I played a couple of rented instruments. I’m certain the same is true in Seattle. Genuine talent is rare, but it is found in unlikely places. Your old man gave up on you before you could discover whether you had the interest and talent to practice every day. I think my cello was about three bucks a month. Adjust for inflation. Even if you have a houseful of kids, a professional can afford that. I’m sorry you didn’t even get a chance to try.
John
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Interesting and true, that you were born at exactly the moment for a fascination with music. But so were lots of other people, and dang near none of them have your knowledge of music and music history.
I agree that Jerry and Itzhak are probably unrelated.
Every time you mention your pop, I love him more. Mine was pretty good, but I love the quizzes you got. Closest we got was Dad’s opinion on politics, but he was willing to listen to other opinions, and then correct them.
That said, I gotta say “huh” when you say there were less expensive trumpeting options. Renting an instrument or borrowing one from the school didn’t occur to me when I was 7, and weirdly never occurred to me over the next 60 years of remembering that the answer was no. Might even be understandable that it didn’t occur to my old man — he had, just a few years earlier, bought a trombone for my older brother, who immediately lost interest.
Might have been nice to toot a trumpet, but the lack of a brass instrument in my childhood is not among my many major scars.
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The best decision Bill Forsyth and David Puttnam made in creating the film Local Hero was to hire Mark Knopfler to score the movie. Here he is (with a fair number of backing instruments) performing the closing number of the film, “Going Home”. If you’ve not seen the film, why the hell not? And don’t leave early. The final scene is subtly one of the best in filmmaking.
jtb
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I have seen Local Hero, but only once, when it first came out. Mostly what I remember is thinking this could be a really good movie if it had less or zero Burt Lancaster. And also I remember being wowed by the music.
Thanks for the listen. The movie’s on my list for a re-watch, which will happen soon.
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For over 40 years Local Hero has been on my top 10 list. I cut the Lancaster scenes in my head and enjoy all the little things — the things that make the movie great: The capitalism wannabe of the townfolk, the number of grains of sand the human hand can hold, the wonderful marriage of the innkeepers, the free enterprise spirit of the Russian fishing boat Captain, the dance with that lovely, terrible band, and the embrace — and finally the indictment — of Capitalism in the heart and brain of the main character. There are 40 or 50 more terrific moments, some in your face and some hidden, in this gem of a movie.
John
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Maybe tonight, if Virgo dominates the night sky…
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