Welcome To My Blog
Welcome to my blog
This will be a place for thoughts and conclusions. Now that I am seventy seven years old I suppose it is timely to pass on any wisdom I might have acquired on the way to this time in my life. I enjoy writing about music and philosophy with a sweet tooth for speculative fiction. I wrote the Star Wars syndicated comic strips back in the late 70’s. and several novels also books about drumming as a soul path.
Now that I am seventy six years old my mind is taking inventory all on its own initiative, so I wake up about 8:20 in the morning with a song going through my head like some AI sub routine; faithfully reproducing a song from my past just behind my eyeballs as if I were still behind the drumset.
This morning it is Robert Palmer singing: “You might as well face it you’re addicted to Love”
This was the beginning of chic blue eyed soul music. It was produced in England. America didn’t have the cultural equanimity to come out with such a slick production Plus Robert Palmer was a suave dude. He didn’t look like a typical rock star: he wore a dark suit with a white shirt and a fore-in-hand knotted tie like he was a corporate executive. His hair was perfect but there was still the air of rebellious spirit.
But the thing that really sold this song and sent it up the charts was the video. Specifically the women in the video. The all-woman band consisted of ultra hot European models that all dressed and appeared to be identical: tall with legs forever, pulled back hair so tight it made their perfect faces taught with restrained passion. They all moved together even though it was obvious they were not really playing their respective instruments. It was the typical set up; Drums, Bass, Guitar, Keyboards and Robert up front with a microphone on a stand and his professional look.
They were thin and emotionless as they went through the motions of swaying back in forth in unison but not together like traditional groups. They were unattached in their own individual worlds while the song cooked in this nasty but polished groove. Robert didn’t have to acknowledge the women. He didn’t really even look at them.
It spoke of a time of sensuality grown up, looking for its equal on the world stage. Hot and sophisticated. Not yet New Age, definitely not punk but an aloof ethic that was more seductive than any other song on the charts. I could go on like Lester Bangs at Creem magazine but the thing that hit me was the chemistry of their skimpy minimalist tube dresses, The material was black and sheer. So sheer that as they moved in their disinterested lasciviousness, their private torsos were betrayed by the bright rock video lighting. They all looked identical too.
The song was good; a first class mix. But the women sold the video. It was beginning of pulp rock and it really worked. So today that is what I am listening to in my Juke box of a brain.
In Memory of Elizabeth Reed
The Allman Brothers will always have a place of honor in my JukeBox Brain. My band Bethlehem Asylum was fortunate enough to open for the original Allmans on numerous occasions in the South when we were all getting started. The cemetery in Macon, Georgia was hallowed ground. Elizabeth Reed’s headstone marked a spiritual commitment to the music. The shimmering guitar duets accompanied by Gregg’s masterful vocals and B3 organ playing, Jaimo and Butch’s unstoppable drumming, Berry’s inspired Bass, celestial slide guitar of Duane and Dicky’s melodic inspiration testified to the fact that they were the greatest blues band in the world. But their arrangements were more classical then merely one chord, four chord and five chord. Duane played Coltrane’s “Love Supreme” in his slide delectations. Witnessing them was a high psychic plateau of creativity that I will always cherish in my Jukebox
brain.
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You Better find somebody to Love
Jefferson Airplane
Yesterday I woke up with Grace Slick wailing in my head, in front of an on-fire band. Jorma, Jack, Paul, Marty and Spencer on drums. This song is relentlessly confrontational and personally addresses the condition of emotional dishonesty. A beginning time when women of power were speaking their minds. Jefferson Airplane signaled the end of an era; bands in uniforms were no longer viable. This is akin to a psychic enema. Psychotherapy disguised as a hit song. When LSD was introduced into the mainstream culture no one had any idea what the outcome would be. Casualties, but also breakthroughs long overdue involving evolution of human consciousness. Things haven’t gotten any better really. But the song has not lost any of its power. It has taken time for the concepts to be seriously regarded. The hope back then was that Love and the commensurate additives would assuage modern cultural isolation. This song forces people to reconsider their aloneness. Its exciting and I don’t mind that my Jukebox Brain has plucked it out of the deep folds of my cerebellum and forced me to witness its greatness all over again.
Hey Mr. Tambourine Man
I first heard this song in high school down in Clearwater, Florida 1966, It felt like a call from a distant mystical land where the music was magical. Of course that interpretation changed once I did get out on the road but the seductive call of that song never left me. It was a way of living in the possibilities of youth. It is playing in my juke box brain and still calls out to me like the pied piper it was back then. Now it is a dangerous calling like a siren from the dangerous deep. After all this time; two hip replacements and all the pain and enlightenment of a lifetime it still calls out to me promising love and excitement that could never be fulfilled but still it is a great song and a testament to what a simple song can do to us.
Fame
David Bowie and John Lennon cowrote this funky hit tune. The groove imitates an original R and B groove maybe from Otis Redding or James Brown. But it has a luster all its own. Lots of angst too. The posturing to avoid fame and glory is appreciated. They are some of the first rock stars to lament what is lost when the song tops the charts. The long slog of paying the manager and lawyer bills with exorbitant concert ticket pricing takes over where there was once simple joy. Years after the huzzah’s have died down the accountants tally up and deliver the bad news that the rock star owes more than they have made minus what the lawyers have stolen is a sobering realization. But the player has no choice but to continue playing, the band goes down with the Titanic. But hey what else can we do but dance? Enjoying the mysterious miracle of music and what it does to our soul is the payback. The guitar lick imitates a Memphis horn line. My JukeBox Brain is hung up on it. Can’t leave it alone. Repeating the phrase like it was foreplay underscoring the original impetus of groove as dance. You don’t have to know anything about moving. I watched Bowie lip synch this on Don Cornelius’ Soul Train and he made it work. What a pro. Would have been nice to witness it with John onboard. Fame, I’ll reject you first…indeed.
I Don’t Like Mondays
Bob Geldof wrote the song in response to a grade school massacre in Southern California back in the eighties. It was a shocking event and the first of many mass shootings in schools. Punk Music was reaching its ascendancy as a marketable commodity and Bob wanted to make a statement. The song was a melancholy lament by a young voice about not liking Mondays. Its was a bittersweet quote attributed to the young girl who was responsible for the atrocity in the school. It was almost funny, if it weren’t so heartbreaking. The song was actually beautiful and confounding in its appeal. It was a harbinger of events like it. Bob redeemed himself soon after by hosting the first Live AID concert in London and simultaneously in New York with drummer Phil Collins appearing live in both venues via his commuting flights on the supersonic Concord jet. Bob’s band, the Boomtown Rats had a level of success. Today is Monday and this tune with its melodious lament is stuck in my JukeBox Brain. I apologize if it offends. No intention of getting a cheap laugh.Gimme Shelter
Rolling Stones nailed the zeitgeist of America back in the Seventies with this song just after the shocking violence at Altamont. The real high point of the song is Mary Clayton’s vocal performance. She put her whole heart and soul into her call and response blending the urgency of a street fight with a Gospel witnessing. It is stuck in my JukeBox Brain for a number of current cultural reasons. Mary reminds us what is good even in adversity. I first witnessed The Stones on their first American tour in the mid Sixties in Clearwater’s Jack Russell stadium. Seems their music gave permission for bad behavior from the get go. The good ol’ boys back then stormed onto the baseball field during only their third song; “Little Red Rooster” giving the CPD cue to shut the concert down. They were whisked off in a limo to their hotel in downtown Clearwater , the Jack Tarr Harrison, which later became headquarters for a science fiction religion. Next day in Clearwater high school the only artifacts were polaroids of Bill Wyman and Brian Jones asleep in their respective hotel room beds taken by our local girl fans who snuck into the Stone’s inner sanctum. The after thought is significant though. Keith later remarked that he woke up in the middle of that night to record a snippet of a song, a distorted guitar lick, then he returned to slumber land only to discover the next day that he had set the groundwork for their biggest hit; “Can’t get no Satisfaction” which could be construed as a critical observation of life in America, or in Clearwater, Florida or right now.
