ANOTHER MAN SPILLS

Urge for Goin'

2009-11-11T21:39:00.017-05:00

I'm always fascinated by cover tunes. I always seek out covers of my favorites. I love hearing someone adapt a great song, and run it through their own filter. If it's done right, it can make you appreciate the original song in a way that you maybe never did before. Both lyrically and musically. But I think it's easier said than done. Certain people have an ability to do it well. Tom Rush is one of those people. I'm hepped up on two outstanding examples where he covers Joni Mitchell songs: The Circle Game, and Urge For Goin.' The former has been in my rotation for some time now. I'll never tire of that one. The latter was thankfully brought to my attention recently. Luckily some people listen for me.

Joni's original version was the one I knew; it featured that clear angelic voice and plucked guitar (double-tracked, I believe), as most of her early work did. Tom Rush's voice is nothing stellar - his reading shines in its simple, evocative musical arrangement. Acoustic and electric guitar, bass, and an occasional and subtle vibraphone. And this spare instrumentation serves up an amazing poetic work. Both versions were recorded ca. 1968, and both are very much of the era. Think Tim Buckley, Fred Neil, people like that. These songs throw me back.

I have to believe she wrote it in November, and it taps into everything romantic about the cold seasonal change. You can feel the North wind. It kind of embodies that first time, usually in late Fall, when you step out into the backyard in late at night and stand there, just breathing, and its cold. Canadian cold, where she comes from. But its about much more than that.

Anyone can have their own melancholy mental musings about seasons and change (and loss), but only the gifted ones can turn them into elegant poetry that hits squarely in the heart. And then compose an accompaniment that squeezes it. Joni is a bonafide phenomenon. Tom Rush gets her.

Spend a buck on Amazon or iTunes and give it a shot (there are two Rush versions, actually). If you already have it, play it now. It's November. It's going down into the 20s here tonight. I have some breathing to do in the backyard.

~ ~ ~

I woke up today and found the frost perched on the town

It hovered in a frozen sky and gobbled summer down

So when the leaves were trembling

Frozen trees were standing in a naked row

I get the urge for going but I never seem to go

And I get the urge for going

when the meadow grass is turning brown

and summertime is falling down

and winter's moving in.

I had a love in summertime with summer-colored skin

and not another one in town my darling's heart could win

But when the sky turned traitor cold

And bully winds did rub their faces in the snow

She got the urge for going and I had to let her go

And she got the urge for going

when the meadow grass was turning brown

Summertime was falling down

and winter's moving in

The warriors of winter gave a cold triumphant shout

Now all that dies is staying and all that lives is getting out

See the geese in chevron flight

Flappin' and a racin' on before the snow

They got the urge for going

They've got the wings to go

They get the urge for going

when the meadow grass is turning brown

And summertime is falling down

and winter's moving in

I'll ply the fire with kindling

and pull the blankets to my chin

I'll lock the vagrant winter out

and bolt my wandering in

I'd like to call back summertime

and ask her just to stay another month or so

But she got the urge for going

I guess she'll have to go

And she got the urge for going

when the meadow grass was turning brown

summertime is falling down and winter's moving in

And she got the urge for going

when the meadow grass was turning brown

All my empires are fallen down and winter's moving in

Before the Fall

2009-09-19T20:44:00.079-04:00

One of the last days of Summer yesterday and it was a good'n. Absolute and pure blue sky, upper 60s, little or no breeze. Two years ago, on a Saturday at this time of year, I would have been off to Central NY or NJ or DE or PA watching my son, like so:

or like so:

As fun as that was it's now really nice to have a Fall weekend to just hang at home. The Fall vibe is already present, not just in the cold night air but in the organic morphings that always mark the season's change. But, there are a number of plants and flowers that are behaving like it's mid July. Like these flowers in my back yard, which are in peak bloom right now (I have no idea what they are):

And these, also unknown to me, which are long and lanky but gorgeous (they also are in the front where almost no sun shines):

The coneflowers are also looking pretty happy:

And these wildflowers (er, weeds) at the back edge along the woods are exploding:

The geraniums, which have been blooming madly this year, show no signs of letting up:

Nor do the impatiens, which in spite of their seeming delicate nature are pretty hardy, and wildly colorful (also in the shady front):

And these haven't even opened yet. They're always the last thing to bloom at my house (whatever they are):

But most things are starting the downhill slide, in one form of degradation or another. The hastas are giving up quickly:

The susans are fighting off the shorter days and cooler nights, but some blooms are spent:

The phlox is also undecided, even within one bloom cluster:

We took a walk over by the zoo and went across the river. Even a middling cell phone picture shows the greens yielding to yellows:

There is a lot of this:

And some of this:

And pretty soon this:

Will become this:

So, another gorgeous day is in the books. And It was embellished by a couple of cherubic encounters:

The Bottle and the Damage Done

2009-08-13T22:39:00.008-04:00

Late yesterday afternoon, Erin was at the house and loading up the baby into the car to head home. Annette was helping. I came walking outside and down the driveway and noticed a guy walking his bike along the opposite side of the street. He was walking swiftly, furtively, but his gait was unsteady and downright wobbly at times. He looked like he was on a mission but it was almost like the bike was holding him up. I pointed him out to Annette and Erin and they looked up and watched with me as he continued along. As he got to a driveway off to our right, he did a big wobble, tripped and went face down into the asphalt. And stayed. His legs were tangled in the bike and he struggling to free himself, but he was failing.

Meanwhile I was hustling over there to help the guy. To be honest, he had looked a bit like your basic drunk person but in a way he also appeared like he might just somebody with a disability - maybe some kind of palsy. So I didn't know what I was going to find when I got to him. I arrived on the scene and pulled the bike off of him. He then rolled over and sat up slowly. I said, "Are you alright, man??" He looked up at me with horrendously bloodshot eyes, and said, almost cheerfully, "Yeah, I'm just drunk, that's all."

Well, OK, now I knew what I was dealing with. He had grass and gravel ground into his knees, like this wasn't the first face-plant he'd done on his little sojourn. So I asked him where he was going. He said home. Where is that, I said. Oh...State Road....or Jackson Road. OK, so, near State and Jackson, I ask? Yeah....near 250, he says. He's given me three road names in the course of about 20 seconds, and I figure he really doesn't know where he's going.

I said, well, if you think you can direct me, I can drive you home. He seemed to like that idea. I told him I'd go get my car, if he promised to just sit right here in the driveway (he hadn't stood up yet). Can you stay put? He looked up at me again and said very obediently, yeah, I can do that.

I walked back to my driveway, and offloaded a bike from my trunk that I had just picked up at the bike shop, all the while keeping an eye over my shoulder on my new charge. He seemed content to just sit. I think he was literally blind drunk and couldn't really see all the way to where I was, so he was just trusting me to come back. Which I did.

I stopped the car right alongside of him, got out and stood him up. He wobbled some more but gathered himself. As I loaded the bike in he started thanking me and telling me what a good guy I was. I was mostly hoping this was not going to become a wild goose chase trying to find his home. Then he started to cry. This made him more unsteady so I told him to just get into the car and sit, which he did, slowly.

I finished with the bike and hopped in. As I turned the car around he started to name off the neighbor's names, correctly, so I realized he must actually have lived nearby. He said he'd been in Webster 35 years and that he was 44 years old. He talked about going to the middle school as we drove by it, and graduating in 1983. The more he talked, the more lucid he sounded. He had no motor skills at that point whatsoever, but his speech and thought processes were surprisingly clear.

I asked him where he'd been today and he said "The Coach", the sports bar in the Village. They apparently don't believe in limiting their customers' intake. If he'd have gotten into a car and drove when he left there, someone would likely have died.

He seemed to be a fairly kind soul, continuing to thank me and call me a good guy. And lament that he he can't function very well when he drinks. He directed me to his place, which was indeed on Jackson Road and I have been driving by it forever. It has a nice red barn that I've always envied, with huge piles of firewood, presumably for sale. I pulled in and we got out. More wobbly thank yous. As I leaned his bike up against a woodpile, I was going to ask him why he was riding his bike to a bar, then it dawned on me that he probably lost his license so I swallowed that question, not wanting to upset him again. But, too late, he started crying again anyway. So I told him to go in and get some food and some sleep, which he promised he would do.

I left him in his driveway, a broken-looking, sad-sack of a guy who seemed to have a good heart but a bad addiction.

Colorblind Graffiti

2009-07-29T20:04:00.022-04:00

I think a book could be written about the late Chuck Cuminale, AKA Colorblind James (see some fantastic history of the Colorblind James Experience here). Somebody oughta write a book. He was a lot of things to a lot of people, a local 'rock' band leader, songwriter, poet, not to mention a husband and father of three boys. Taken at the age of 49. I grew up next door to Chuck, so he was always Chuck to me, as opposed to the personality "Colorblind" to much of the rest of world. As a kid, and as an adult for that matter I definitely looked up to him. Some comments I wrote about him after his death can be found here, along with comments by so many others who knew him well, many better than me.

I often think about him and the things we did together during childhood. A while back I remembered an incident from all those years ago that was particularly funny to me, so I wrote it up and passed it along to just a few people who I had Chuck in common with as a close friend. It was just one of those things that showed how Chuck was not like other kids.

Allow me to recycle it:

- - - - - - - -

Let’s call it 1967. I’m about thirteen years old. I live a short distance away but I’m hanging out with my old Manse Lane buddies. A veritable gang, we are. I’m probably the youngest of the bunch, along with Jim Lotze. The gang is rounded out, as best I can remember by Rick Lotze, Horse Provenzano, Carl Hotto, Wayne Young, and fearless if somewhat reluctant leader Chuck. If I’m thirteen these guys are about 16. This gang was a bunch of wiseasses if not badasses. There were no future convicts in this group. The order of the day was wisecracking humor, making fun of others, barbs back and forth.

A summer night with nothing to do, so we roam. Probably from house to house, gaining gang members and moving on. Eventually we are out in the open weedy field that ran along behind the houses on the south side of the street. That field used to be unoccupied by anything except a makeshift lacrosse field that we used after someone’s father mowed down some of the weeds. But on this night the eastern end is now a construction site, where the Rochester Christian School is being erected. It’s a typical construction site, with a bulldozer, piles of materials and equipment and partially-raised brick walls.

Lo and behold, someone had a can of spray paint. Red. I have no idea why they have it, or if it was premeditated to bring it. But there it is, and now the talk is of vandalism, and what to paint with it. We laugh at various things we could do with the spray paint. It’s dusk and moving quickly into darkness. More laughing. There happens to be a large white shed on the far side of the site. Chuck has settled on what its going to be. The paint is going on the shed. We have now moved into graffiti vandalism. But unlike any other mid-sixties roaming gang of teenagers on a summer night, there will be no drawings of genitalia, marijuana leaves, no profanity, no racial slurs. And it is further decided that we will each take turns contributing to the act, so all are equally culpable. The cap comes off and the paint goes on. When the deed is done, we step back briefly to view our handiwork before taking off into the darkness. In neat, large, red block letters, we have championed a great cause to all who can read: “Re-elect Chester A. Arthur."

painting by Paul Dodd:

http://www.therefrigerator.net/art/paintings/icons6.html

Blonde on Blonde

2009-07-23T21:55:00.012-04:00

I drove to Buffalo twice this week. On the way back yesterday I listened again to Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. And actually it was the reissued/remastered version that came out a few years back. I actually got it in 2006, which I believe was the 40th anniversary of the original release.

I get boggled every time I listen to that CD. How a person can come up with so much great material at one time is beyond me. It's got 14 songs and every single one of them knocks me out. There isn't single clunker on it. If you forced me to pick a least favorite it would probably be Rainy Day Women, and that went to No. 2 on the charts.

I don't want to get going on what was his best album, or best songs ever, or where his best lyrical work was. You can't do that with someone like Dylan - it's an exerecise in futility. But he was an absolute poetic machine on this album. The cover shot was out of focus but the words were sharp as a tack:

"The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face."

"The guilty undertaker sighs...the lonesome organ grinder cries"

"When I asked him why he dressed

with twenty pounds of headlines

stapled to his chest"

"Inside the museums,
Infinity goes up on trial...
Voices echo this is what
salvation must be like after a while"

Most of the musicians were session guys, but there is heavy presence by Al Kooper and Robbie Robertson. Joe South even played some guitar. Other members of The Band also contributed, but apparently those songs didn't make the cut.

I was 12 when it came out and I was listening to it then, in my 12-year-old way, because my brother had it. The lyrics meant nothing to me then - it was the sound. But forty three years later I'm still digging it, and even though the de facto meaning of some of the lyrics might still be elusive, they "glow like burning coal." (OK, different album, but you get the idea).

The Second First Day

2009-07-18T09:34:00.016-04:00

I remember my first day as a professional geologist. Monday, August 21st, 1980. I had finished school in May with a bachelor's degree, and worked the summer installing vinyl siding, which I'd had experience with before. In mid-summer I got word of an opening at an engineering firm in Rochester, where the boyfriend of a classmate at Geneseo with was quitting, because they were headed off to Texas for grad school. I sent my resume, got an interview, and sealed the deal.

I'd had a lot of jobs up to that point. My first was at the Rochester public market when I was about 14. Then it was the Bernunzio/Randisi family-owned RanCora Bakery, around the corner from the market (they later moved it to Webster). Later it was a painting business with buddy Rick, painting the new homes his dad built. My sister got me a job at the old Village Grill at the Four Corners in Penfield, as a busboy. I stuck around there for a while and became a lunch cook, then on to dinners. I did some carpentry, and more siding of apartment buildings. I did a stint at a plastics injection business, on the night shift while I was going to MCC. I made all kinds of wierd plastic parts for Xerox copiers. So I'd had a few "first days" at work before.

But this was going to be different. This was a career gig. I now had a career, not just a job. This elevated everything. I had to act different, think different. And look different. I knew I'd be doing a lot of field work, but there would be office time, too. I needed some new clothes. I bought some some new khakis, and a shirt or two. I remember looking in the mirror wondering if I really looked the part. I also remember thinking, no.

So I reported for duty on day one. Dressed in my new duds, my introduction to the consulting engineering business was painting the walls in some new office space. I got paint on my khakis.

Twenty eight years later, still at the same company I was part of a reduction in force, a downsizing, an adjustment, a lay-off. I got fired.

Fast-forward four months. I got hired by another engineering firm. Similar but different. A smaller company than my previous employer, but almost four times as many people in the building as I was used to in our branch office. My first day was filled with introductions - I night have met forty people. CEO, President, Department Heads, HR and Admin people, and most of the people in the environmental department that I'd be part of. I told someone that even though I had all this gray hair, it was only my second first day at work ever, at least as a professional.

There happened to be that day a company-wide meeting at lunchtime, with over a hundred people in attendance. There were several presentations by group leaders, and the HR people talked about all of the new and recent hires, including me. One of the presenters even referred to me as "an expert in natural gas exploration," which I am not by any stretch of the imagination. Somehow in going from my resume to that powerpoint presentation, my experience morphed into something that sounded waaay too important. I sat there thinking "what did I get myself into? Isn't there just a room somewhere that needs painting??"

I wiped my sweaty hands on my new khakis.

2009-06-03T19:42:00.008-04:00

It's been over a year since I last posted something here. I got a lot of feedback on the stuff I wrote, for which I was very appreciative. And I think I got more feedback about stopping than I did about writing. Apparently people were actually reading this stuff. I started out just doing it for the hell of it, and I think the more I realized people were actually checking it out, the more pressure I felt to write something worth reading. And it became clear there is an inverse relationship between perceived pressure and my ability to write. A lot of people have told me I should write professionally, like music critiques, or whatever. I'm afraid there's no way - can't do it with a gun (deadlines) to my head.

Since I last wrote, much has happened to me. I continued the project assignment in DC through July of last summer. I was working long hours but was able to do a LOT of bike riding, albeit in the stifling Washington heat.

I missed the Rochester Jazz Festival, for all intents and purposes, for the first time ever. That was a major downer. But right after I finished that project, I went on what was probably the best vacation of my life. My whole family rented a ginormous house on the beach in the Outer Banks. The weather cooperated, the ocean cooperated and all 20 or so of us cooperated. There aren't too many families that could put 20 people of three generations (technically four since my daughter was pregnant at the time), into one house for a week and not have at least a little discord. But we can. Maybe because we had practice over several years in beach homes in Virginia Beach in the 80s when my Mom was still alive. But mostly because I have a most awesome family, and how can you not get along in such a great setting?

The kids are old enough to fend for themselves, and even go out by themselves, so that takes pressure off. I pretty much buried my toes in the sand, read books and listened to CDs for most of it. Everyone found their own groove and ran with it. It was perfect. As Elmer Fudd said, "west and wewaxation at wong wast."

In November I became a grandfather. If that in itself was not incredible enough, I was actually able to be present in the room when Cameron Robert Borja came into our lives. I was present for both of my kid's births, but because I'm older and was just a spectator this time, it was an entirely different experience, and maybe even more amazing this time around, in some ways. I guess I had a more....existential take on it all, and the miraculous nature of the event hit home more directly than it did when I was in my 20s. It was life-changing, again.

I could write a book about the baby, and how relating to him since his birth has affected me. Another post for another time.

Fast-forward to March, when I was laid off from my job of 28 years. Life changing, indeed. I'm still in mid-change, not having garnered a replacement job. Working on that. I have had several interviews and informal meetings with people and firms I know in the business. Several have promise, but as of now it's just talk. Until someone sends me a letter of employment, that's all it is. In the meantime, I am working on keeping the stress under control. The mortgage never sleeps.

One advantage of unemployment was that I got to delve deeply into the jazz fest this year. I made up for last year, to be sure. Many late nights, but who cares? I could sleep late. That's how it's done. The local music critic Jeff Spevak was putting "Jazz Haikus" in his daily review articles. I did one of my own:

Nine nights of music
Sleep is much overrated
And the beat goes on

So, an eventful 12 or 13 months, more good than bad. Ac-cent-uate the positive, e-lim-nate the negative. Easier said than done, I'm afraid. but now that Summer is here, it helps.

One Time One Night In America

2008-05-31T10:34:00.012-04:00

Friday night. Warm. Tyson's Corner, Virginia. I drive. Dolly Madison Parkway to George Washington Parkway. Francis Scott Key Bridge. Potomac. Georgetown. M Street. Friday night action. High-end shops. Money. Bars. Short skirts. Cell phones (thousands, all in use, constantly). Park the car. Walk. Noisy pub. Cold stout. Yum. Celtics-Pistons on the flat screen. Conference finals. Close game. Watching over the top of the draft handles. Empty glass. Every sip marked with a ring. Leave. Car. Drive. Friday night streets. People, people, people. Yuppies abound. Loosened ties. Tree-lined. Brownstones. Wrought iron.

DuPont Circle. Head north. Adams Morgan. Shaw. U Street. People, people, people. A more mixed crowd. Very funky. Dirtier streets. Bodegas. Bars (lots). No parking spaces. Drive the streets. Dark. Park. Walk. Live music - jazz, hip hop. Sound spills. Bistro. Walk in. Sit. Cold IPA. Yum. Celtics on the flat screen. Still close game. KG has been asleep, it seems. Only two points. Order sandwich. Noise. Young crowd. Finish. Move to barstool. Celtics trailing by 8. Fourth quarter. Detroit crowd raucus. Looks like there will be game 7. Wait. KG wakes up. Celtics run. Close gap. I can't watch. I Walk.

Two blocks. Bohemian Cavern. Pay the bouncer on the street. Down one flight. It's a cave. Really. I sat here:

History here. Duke. Cab. Aretha. Ella. Louie. Coltrane. Dolphy. Byrd. Miles. The list goes on.

Small crowd. Young (I'm always the oldest guy in the place). Mostly African-American. Table, drink. Wait. The band shows. Trio. Drums. Bass. Tenor Sax. Bop. Solos. Originals. Wails. Jazz. Coolness. 'round midnight. Brown walls. Brown floor. Brown tables. Brown instruments. Brown musicians. Brown patrons. The unused baby grand is black. The music is black. I almost miss the cigarette smoke. Almost.

[sidebar: Celtics win! The first Lakers-Celtics Finals in over two decades. All is right with the world]

Monumental

2008-05-03T09:42:00.012-04:00

I spent three days in our nation's capitol this week. I was in a hotel near our office on the northwestern side of town. Thursday night was a warm one, so I headed into the City to do a little walking around. I scooted along Potomac on the George Washington Parkway then over the Arlington Bridge and found a parking spot near the Potomac Park ballfields. Softball seemed to be the order of business that night - most fields were full of shouting and cheering people.

I walked toward the Washington Memorial, 555 ft. of straight-up granite, sandstone and marble. It so dominates the scene that you are naturally drawn to it. This is big scale stuff, and very bright in color if the sun is out, which it still was, although already dropping toward horizon.

But I first came upon the new WW II Memorial, so I diverted in to see that. Again, a big-scale monument, all done in bright-colored granite, so that low sun was giving it a little more pinkish cast than the Washington. A big oval pool and fountain, a large stone block open tower on either side representing Atlantic and Pacific, and a series of squarish granite columns, one for each state, ringing the whole thing. Lots and lots of bronze wreaths and plaques and relief panels depicting war-related scenes, both on the battlefield and on the home front. And several quotes from famous war-related people, like an excerpt from the FDR' "...date which will live in infamy" speech chiseled into the rock.

From there I was drawn back further away from the Washington, along the reflecting pool toward the west to to the Lincoln Memorial. The area was not crowded at all, being a weekday and with night approaching. Before going up the steps to see Ol' Abe, I walked around the backside of the memorial, and it helps to drive home just how big this thing is.

White Georgia marble. The columns that ring it are about 40 ft. high. The sun was even lower now and the rock was getting even more colorful. When I raised the camera to take a shot, the kid in the yellow shirt spotted me and decided my picture needed some hip hop bravado.

I circled around front and up the steps, which are huge. Abe is huge, the walls are huge, the Ghettysburg Address is huge. It's all so grand. The steps are a great place to sit and people watch. The people were animated, energetic. Lots of school groups. A small flock of geese flew into the reflecting pond and stirred up the refection of The George. Grand.

Still not quite dark, so I stroll some more, to the north, past just a handful of large trees and I am at the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial. I had been there once before, when we took the kids and spent a few days doing what Americans do in D.C. We saw all of these monuments and more on that trip. I still remember being most affected by this one, and it was no different this time. At this point it was dusk, no more sunbeams or glow, which contrasted what I was just seeing moments ago.

The design of this structure is such a drastic departure from the typical Capitol motif. Small, finite, dark and stark. Cut into a small grassy mound, not perched on a hill or surrounded by gardens. No columns, fountains, steps or statutes. Just a long, low bent wall of black Indian granite slabs, maybe 10 ft. high at their highest. And 58,159 etched names. It really hits you. People file along slowly, saying little. Not a lot of smiling, definitely some tears. Lots of flowers and mementos left at the base. The granite is polished so you can see your reflection but you are just a dark silhouette with hundreds of names superimposed. I did not lose any family members or even close friends in that war, in fact I really didn't even know anyone who was killed. But it immediately brought me back to that time. I remember being petrified when I found out there was going to be a draft lottery and my name was going into the hat. Lottery numbers were drawn that year (1973) for draftees to be taken the following year, but I got a high number and the actual drafting stopped that same year anyway so it was a moot point.

It was now dark on the ground and the sky was right behind, so I headed back to the car. The ball fields were empty. For a short distance I was walking near near three guys, 30-somethings in ball uniforms walking along the sidewalk, in after-game mode and carrying a big cooler. Their conversation sounded lawyer-like. I started envisioning them as West Wingers. Maybe I watch too much TV.

The Week That Was

2008-04-17T22:58:00.007-04:00

Nancy Griffith married, then unmarried him. Townes Van Zandt "borrowed" horses at night from a neighboring ranch with him. Donald Turnupseed ended up in one of his songs. Jeff Spevak wrote an article about him. Scott Regan blogged him. Most importantly, Rick and Monica Simpson brought him here from Texas for a House Concert last Sunday night.

Eric Taylor showed up and kept his part of the bargain, as did Rick and Monica. They provided a living room full of listeners, he provided two solid sets of entertaining acoustic, bluesy folk songs. Eric plumbs the depths of human relationships, especially the disfunctional ones, with a poet's touch. He's not shy with his lyrics. After finishing the first song, which contained 'strong sexual content' as it were, he remarked, "Well, they're not Sunday school songs." There's nothing like the intimacy of a living room to listen to someone like this. Kudos to RicMon31 Productions for pulling this off.

[photo by Mike Hanlon - http://www.hanlonphotographic.com/]

Tuesday John called to say he had a couple of free tix to Sonny Landreth and the Campbell Brothers at Water Street. I had never seen either act so it was like scratching an itch. The Campbell Brothers really rocked it - they got everybody sweaty right off the bat. They don't screw around, they get right to it. Chuck campbell's pedal steel absolutely flies, and Phil Campbell's guitar rocks pretty damn good for a guy who was originally a drummer and is supposedly a better bass player than he is a guitar player. There were no skinny people on stage save for the lanky white bass player. The drummer was strong - you gotta be to fuel that train. Sonny Landreth played with them for their last tune and blew the the band away as much as the crowd. Phil Campbell kept looking in amazement at Sonny's hands.

Sonny came back out in power trio form and proceeded to shred conventional notions of how guitars are supposed to played. He picks and plucks and whaps and slides and slashes like a madman, but always in perfect technical control. Never takes the bottleneck off of his left pinky. Extemely LOUD. Scott Regan and Sue Rogers had extra space at their table in the front row for Sonny's set so I was just a few feet from him and mostly heard the music from the stack behind him rather than the PA. He seems to better understand, and coax more from the harmonics of vibrating steel strings than anyone I've ever heard. But as John and I agreed afterward, its not just self-serving technical tricks for tricks' sake - he's got southern white-boy soul.

Friday night it was back into the woods in Huntington Hills for another House Concert. Paul and Peggi had coerced Pete LaBonne into giving up an hour of his brief visit with Shelly to Rochester to do a solo set in their own living room for about 20 people. Pete is a musical treasure who operates mostly in obscurity. He plays guitar and fronts the Milltown Bastards who can be occasionally spotted around Saratoga Springs. He also plays piano with the ethereal groove unit that is Margaret Explosion (a name he coined) when the timing works out. He plays bass. Accordion. Probably spoons. But most of all, he's a writer and lyricist like you've never heard. I defy you to show me someone who has even a slightly similar approach to writing songs. And he's not lazy - he's got a large body of work. I can't do his work or style justice with a few sentences here. Spend some time at the link above and get to know the "metabolic unit in a sporty driftwood hat."

[photo by Paul Dodd]

Three shows in six nights, each one a gem in its own way. It was a great week.

I Wish I Was Always That Calm

2008-04-12T06:38:00.003-04:00

I left D.C. mid-afternoon Friday, driving my rental car. I'd been there all week working on a project. It had been a week of long hours, and I was ready to get on home. It took me about 7-1/2 hours to drive down there last Sunday night but I knew this would be a longer drive, because I was leaving D.C. on a Friday afternoon. I think it took me two hours just to get past Baltimore and up to the Pennsylvania line, crawling most of the way. It was warm, about 70 degrees, and the trees down there are starting to leaf out. As soon as I got into PA, it started raining.

On and on across the high plateaus of the Keystone State in the rain. As darkness came on I was finally feeling the tug of home stronger than the push of D.C., barrelling past Homer, New York on I-81. It was after 10 PM, and I was bleary eyed, but the rain was stopping. I had some old-timey music turned up loud to stave off the boredom. At one point I was fidgeting with the CD player, not fully attentive to the road, and I looked up just as a I blew by a car parked on the shoulder. I only just caught the most brief of glimpses of this image due to my speed, inattentiveness, and fatigued condition. What my weary brain told me I saw, although I wasn't sure, was a girl in a long dress or coat, standing behind a vehicle, holding a sign with a flashlight shining on it. I thought I saw the word GAS.

I'm still zooming, my mind is running this scenario over, I'm thinking how badly I want to get home, but I think that was a pretty clear plea for help that I couldn't ignore. I hit the brakes. By the time I came to a stop I was a couple of thousand feet beyond her. Into reverse goes the car and I start backing up. That's never a good thing to do, especially on a rainy night. There happens to be a break in the traffic so I decide to get the backing up over with quickly, and I speed up. It's not easy to maintain a straight track going fast in reverse, so I'm swerving. I got back to the car, a mini-van, and put my car in park, not really sure what I was getting myself into. She probably wondered the same after observing my swerving approach. I see in my rear-view mirror a driver getting out of the car. I do the same and we meet between the vehicles, bathed in flashing red and amber light. It's a young man, tall, thin, bearded, glasses. I said, "you got some trouble?" He confirmed, in a most polite voice, that they thought they were out of gas, although they weren't sure because the gauge was broken. I said I didn't have a gas can, but I'd take them to find a gas station. We were close to the next exit, I figured it couldn't be that far. He said OK and headed back to his car. I started clearing out all of the clothes and CDs and food that was scattered in my car. He suddenly came back and said "Is it OK if my wife and young son come, too?" Of course, I say, we don't want to leave them on the side of the interstate alone.

It was then I finally got a closer look at the wife, who was carrying a baby totally wrapped in a blanket. And she was wearing a bonnet on her head, a la Amish or Mennonite. I realized that also matched his appearance, as he was wearing dark gray dress pants and coat, and black shoes. We pile into the car and we're off. We get off at the next exit, but it was bleak and dark and barren of anything at all. So I headed east, hoping I wasn't in for a long chase for fuel. But it gave me a chance to talk to them. They were from southern Pennsylvania, headed for a friend's wedding up near Lowville, New York. Their plan was to get a hotel room in Syracuse for the night. The van was a loaner from their church's pastor, with 200,000-plus miles on it, and he had warned them of the gas gauge. But the kid thought he was well within the distance the pastor had said they could go before needing to gas up again. After a few miles we came to a crossroads with a gas station, and were able to take care of business pretty quickly. While he was filling the gas can I talked to the girl a bit. I had noticed an accent when she first spoke, and it turned out she was Ukrainian. She had a beautful face, with huge cheekbones and perfect skin. Her expression, and her entire demeanor for that matter were completely devoid of concern with the night's turn of events. I still hadn't really seen the baby, as only the crown of its head showed outside the folds of the quilt. It could've been a doll for all I knew. She said it was a boy and he was eleven months old today. I asked if this was his first trip away from home and she said no, he'd already traveled to the Ukraine with them.

On the drive back to the van I told him I'd run out of gas many times in my younger years, having driven many a junker car. "But," I joked, " I don't think I ever did it with my wife and baby on board!" He chuckled, and then he said in a most reassured voice, "Well, I'm a Christian and I always believe the Lord will provide." A lot of people might say that's a naive outlook. My reply was "So am I and so do I."

It took a while to get the van to start, but start it did. I wished them luck the rest of the way and they showed real gratitiude for the help. They were about to take off ahead of me, when he came trotting back to my car, and in that polite voice, tried to offer me some money. I said thank you, but I'm sure the Lord will provide for me.

Coat of One Color

2008-03-29T14:02:00.000-04:00

I drove to Buffalo Friday morning. A weather system had sprinted through western New York the night before, headed almost due east. It wasn’t overly big in areal extent but it had some energy and speed. Areas away from the lake and higher in elevation got heavier accumulations, but the route from Webster to Downtown Buffalo had been equally coated with only about three inches of snow from start to finish. The snow’s consistency was very moist, and the storm hadn’t packed too much of a wallop in terms of wind, so the snowflakes were able to grab ahold of the first thing they touched and stay put. Like a whipped cream layer on every surface. No plant, object or surface went uncoated. If it wasn't for body heat, every critter would have looked like an unshorn sheep.

Normally when you look at a stand of bare trees and peer into the mass of wood you see branches but their dark appearance can make it hard to distinguish the branches of one tree from the next. This snow coat had been able to individually wrap the smallest of twigs on every tree, and with the storm being pretty freshly finished, the wind and sun had not yet begun to strip that delicate coating. In that gray morning light it was not hard to see nearly the entire structure of any individual tree. And no two trees alike, just like the snowflakes. Somewhere past Batavia there was a stretch where a fog layer had developed over the vast open fields, but was elevated off the ground somewhat. The tops of the taller trees and the occasional cell tower faded upward to nothingness. It was like driving in a dream, and what is possibly the most boring and uninteresting stretch of road I know of was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a long time.

Uptown Downtown

2008-03-07T23:21:00.000-05:00

Tonight was another great musical event sponsored by my good friends John and Julie Bernunzio, at their Uptown Music store downtown on East Avenue. The two of them have been purveyors of vintage (and now also new) stringed instruments for many years now (probably 3-1/2 decades in John's case). You won't find a bigger, better collection of guitars, mandolins and banjos in this part of the country, and maybe anywhere for all I know. If you've never been, you must. You don't have to be a musician to appreciate what a gem of an establishment this store is, and what a great contribution to the City's East End it is. It's a visual extravaganza of strings and frets, with an amazingly warm glow about it.

They were only open for about a year when they decided to expand, and it now has enough breathing room to host wonderfully intimate performances by people who really know how to use frets and strings. Tonight it was Steve Piper, Maria Gillard and Scott Regan, who are collectively known as The Amazing Crandalls. Sweet folk music of the local persuasion. And they closed with Dylan's I Shall Be Released so everybody got to pitch in.

I've known John and Julie since I was a young teenager. Julie grew up on my street and was my sister Sheila's best friend. John's younger brother Tom was my very close buddy back in school days and I worked at their family's business, RanCora Bakery, for a few years. I always tell people I was a token member of the Bernunzio family, and their mom Clara was such a great cook, my mom asked me why I never came home for dinner anymore. I learned all about construction from their father Sam when the new bakery was built in Webster and they moved the business out of the city. Tom and Ginny were at the show tonight so it was great to catch up with them.

My sisters played matchmakers all those years ago and got John and Julie together. The matchmaking business can be a very slippery slope, and I remember telling them that, but luckily they did not listen to me, as this was a real success story.

One of their most famous customers, and a long time friend of theirs is David Grisman. Thanks to John and Julie I got to meet one of my all-time musical heroes:
Anytime there is music in this store it's a wonderful event. You can imagine what a hub of activity it is during the Jazz Festival. Uptown Music is Rochester's version of McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, famous for it's long tradition of live shows. Let's hope this new local tradition becomes a long one, too.

Guitarred and Feathered redux

2008-03-02T21:18:00.000-05:00

Caught the show by Guitarrred and Feathered last night. Again, let me say:

A little over a year ago I saw them and wrote down a brief review when I got home. I had no blog at the time but I sent it to Scott Regan, who forwarded it on to Phil Marshall who posted it on his own blog. Allow me to recycle:

=============

Guitarred and Feathered
Daily Perks Coffeehouse
November 4, 2006

It’s the old three-legged stool analogy – each leg is equally important and required to keep it upright. The legs on this musical stool – Phil Marshall, Scott Regan and Kinloch Nelson – were clearly each cut from a different type of tree and each turned on a different lathe. But they play complimentary acoustic guitar styles that make for a comfortable and sturdy work as a whole.Each performer took turns this night playing and/or singing, with collaboration on many of the tunes.

Kinloch Nelson uses his considerable technical virtuosity on aggressively-interpretive versions of a wide variety of song styles. Old TV themes like “Get Smart” and “Rawhide” were fun, “Sleepwalk” and “Song of India” were lush and dense with changes. A high point was a sad and gentle instrumental version of the Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy” – his elegant tone and texture gave a rich rosewood feel. He seems to use all ten fingers in a flurry of plucking and strumming that creates an atmospheric resonance.

Scott Regan is a wonderful and gifted songwriter – I’ll stand on Steve Earl’s coffee table in my hiking boots and say that. His style is cut from a straight-trunked maple. He has a unique perspective, which any good songwriter needs, and his compositions generally seem to expose the underlying grain of personal experience. His lyrics and song structure bring to mind John Prine or Michael Hurley; he clearly could play on the same stage with either and no one would be embarrassed.

Phil Marshall is that well-traveled, intricate piece of driftwood that has seen its share of shorelines. He delved into old standards and pop hits with a varied and often jazzy feel. He was equally at home with a soft, bossa nova strumming style as he was with rootsy country and blues picking. His solo reading of “Begin the Beguine” gave the song a feeling that won’t be found in any big band version. He launched into a gorgeous rendition of “Nature Boy” before cutting it short because he couldn’t quite remember the lyrics; the haunting instrumentation alone would have sufficed – it was that good. And his understated touch with the bottleneck in support of the other players always lent a nice feel.

They all pitched in on Nelson’s version of Lorne Greene’s “Ringo.” And speaking of Ringo, the Beatles were well-represented through “Norwegian Wood” (with deep resonant harmonics from Phil’s guitar) and “Blue Jay Way.”

These three should make their way into a studio and capture some of this stuff, although a small room full of coffee drinkers may be where they are most at home.

Federal Agent-at-Large Presley

2008-03-01T08:44:00.000-05:00

I'm not as big a fan of Elvis's music as most people are, but he was certainly a compelling figure, not just as a musical phenom but as an American icon. And of all the pictures taken of him, this is the most compelling, for me. It's a famous shot, everyone has seen it. But thanks to the National Security Archive at George Washington University, you can get the REST of the story, and it's a good one. There are several documents, but they are brief so don't skip them. None more precious than Elvis's hand-written note to Nixon asking for the meeting.

[I'll let Mr. President here have a look at these, but you keep your distance, mister]

The ghost of cosmos past

2008-02-26T21:25:00.001-05:00

In my previous entry about the Whole Earth Catalogue I mentioned that it offered a book by Carl Sagan. That just happened to be something that caught my eye as I perused the big pages of the catalogue - I could just have easily spotted and mentioned a thousand other items. But I guess that grabbed me because Sagan was always a fascinating person to me - a true scientific genius to whom normal people could relate and who could present weighty scientific subject matter in a way the masses could stomach. The guy had an unbelievable resume and a massive bibliography of published works including hundreds of scientific papers, books, and even a novel, Contact, that became a Hollywood movie. He was also, as most people who operate at high levels like that are, controversial. His tenure at Cornell's Laboratory For Planetary Studies was not without problems. He wasn't just some boring planethead.

So that was my first mention of him.

Sunday I drove down to Ithaca with Gilmore to see a John Hiatt/Lyle Lovett concert. We had time to kill so I was showing him some sights I came to know when I was working on some long-term projects that kept me there during the week for extended periods in the early 80s. I got to know the town pretty well. I told him I was going to take him down the best street in Ithaca, one I'd found in my evening cruises back then. It was immediately below the Cornell campus, alongside the Cascadilla Creek gorge (Ithaca is Gorges, after all). It's drastically steep in that area so there are lots of sharp switchbacks, and it's very narrow but lined with these beautiful tudor-style homes. Sort of the Finger Lakes answer to Lombard Street.

Having been years since I had been on the street, it took a while to find, but that was alright because in our search we found a couple of other great spots I'd never seen before. Eventually we found it (Cascadilla Park Road) and as we were descending I mentioned Sagan's name again because back when I was working down there I had heard that he had lived on this street. I never confirmed that it was true but it always seemed plausible and gave the street a little more mystique than it already had to me.

We headed in to the concert (in the newly-renovated State Theater), and the show was outstanding. It was an acoustic set, with these two very formidable musicians sitting side by side and trading witty banter when they weren't playing their formidable songs. Much of the conversation came in the form of Lovett doing some pseudo psychoanalysis on Hiatt. It was humorous and entertaining. I don't really remember why or how but somewhere along the line they got talking about the Dalai Lama and his name resurfaced two or three times before the show was over. It was sort of an odd, out-of-context thing, as his name wouldn't be a typical relate in a country and blues show.

Tonight I watched a portion of a documentary about Ronald Reagan with Annette. The show was all about his unbending foreign policy with regard to the Soviet Union and how that ultimately resulted in the end of the Cold War. I'm not here to extol the virtues of Reagan, but it was an interesting look back at a pretty heady time in world history. A big part of the story was, of course, the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"). One passage showed some of the silly, cartoonish animated renderings that were made to try to explain to the public just what SDI was. It showed little green satellites shooting laser beams back and forth and blowing up missiles. And there in the middle of that segment came a brief flash of a press conference with Carl Sagan. He was cleverly mocking the whole concept of SDI and imitating the little cartoon and the laser gun sounds, much to the entertainment of the press.

Since that was my third close encounter with Carl Sagan in a short period of time, I took that as a sign and did some further digging. I Googled his name, and up comes the link to carlsagan.com, better known as "The Carl Sagan Portal." Oooohh. The first word on the menu that catches my eye is "Blog." Is Carl blogging from his new place in the cosmos? I click on it and it turns out to be written by his widow, Ann Druyan (his third wife, and her resume is equally impressive) and without really reading any of it, I scroll down the window of text and immediately come upon this picture:

His book Cosmos is supposedly the best-selling science book ever published in English, and his Cosmos series is supposedly the most watched show ever shown on PBS.

One of his most intriguing ventures may have been his involvement with the possibilities of communication with life elsewhere in the solar system and the universe. He chaired the committee that planted the gold-coated phonograph discs on the Voyager spacecrafts that contain information from and about Earth. Elvis has left the building and Voyager I has left the solar system, and is now steaming into the great beyond (currently in the heliosheath) carrying a gold platter that has on it some Chuck Berry music, thanks to Carl.

Sagan is buried in the Lakeview Cemetery in Ithaca, just a meteorite's throw from the switchback road where he may or may not have lived, and probably under billions and billions of particles of soil:

A war story

2008-02-20T23:01:00.000-05:00

Working as a geologist for 27 years has put me in some pretty interesting places and given me a few stories to tell. I've found myself in spots that most people don't get access to. Tunnels, salt mines, coal mines. Nuclear and hydro power plants. Nasty, contaminated industrial sites. The bottom of a deep excavation (with a supplied-air mask) standing on drums of hazardous waste that hadn't seen daylight for three decades. A clean room where CDs are manufactured, which required special sterile clothing. I got caught in a big storm at night on a steel barge on the Great Salt Lake. I got to spend time on a private island or two in the Bahamas. Main Street in downtown Houston on the graveyard shift with a drill rig, along with the hookers and drunk urban cowboys. The list is long and probably boring to most people. Anybody working in the engineering consulting business gets to do things like this and has their own list of war stories. And we trade them regularly. It's what makes the insanity of consulting palatable, for me anyway.

Back in 1990 we were doing a lot of environmental work for Kodak, which had its share of big-time contamination problems. We did a lot of sampling all over Kodak Park, and it usually involved a lot of drilling of soil and rock. Characterizing the geologic conditions was a big part of every investigation. After studying isolated pockets of Kodak Park over the years, it was decided that our company would do a more comprehensive, regional geologic study and report that would serve as a backdrop for all of these individual studies we were doing. This was a boon to us geologists on staff at the time as it gave us free rein to study the overall geology of the Rochester area, both on paper and in the field. I was lucky enough to be involved in both aspects. The field work included getting out and doing some bedrock mapping at some of the few rock outcrops we have in this area.

One of the best places to see the local rock formations is in the barge canal on the west side of the city. It's one long outcrop, and it exposes one of the few faults in the area. We decided in April to take my canoe along the canal because the ice had thawed and they had just begun refilling it for the summer. So the water level was high enough to canoe but not yet high enough to inundate the rock walls. I was joined by two women, Suzanne, who worked with me, and Judy who worked for Kodak. Geologists all. Even though it was only April it was a sunny and calm day, the kind that can give you your first sunburn of the season. We put in somewhere west of Rt. 390 and slowly headed east. The plan was to just take a lot of pictures and notes, and get a few fracture and bedding measurements with the Brunton Compass. We all knew it was a gift of a workday and we were ready to enjoy it. Nothing like getting paid to spend a nice day outside on the water.

Being so early in the season, we had the canal to ourselves. The first thing we noticed was the abundance of flotsam and jetsam being delivered by the current, which we were going against. That included a dead raccoon and other small and decaying organisms. I guess the canal in winter is the place to die if you're a critter. I remember quipping that we better keep our eye out for something bigger and shaped like us. We cruised along, stopping here and there to be geologists and after about a half a day we were somewhere past Buffalo Road. The walls are vertical and fairly high along that stretch, and the slopes above are covered in dense brush. You can't see much from down in the canal, nor can you be seen, except from the occasional bridges.

A tree had toppled from the upper slope into the water and was laying against the rock face like a rake against a garage wall. As we approached it we could see a dark object floating up against it. Because of our earlier joking about the possibility, I think we knew right away what it was, but your mind does play tricks on you, so we couldn't be sure. Like when you're driving along the road and something on the shoulder looks from a distance like one thing but when you get close to it turns out to be something entirely different from what you were sure you saw. I steered the canoe directly toward it, and as we got close, any questions about what it was were imediately answered, by observation and smell. We had us a dead body.

Gruesome is a good word - all bloated and rotten. Pardon the pun but it was doing the dead man's float. Only the shoulders and back were really above water. But the thing I remember most clearly was the stench. We did not stay close for long.

It's pretty weird to come upon a body, especially when that was not our purpose for being there. We weren't on a missing person hunt, but we found one. So now what do we do? Well, it was 1990, but being slightly ahead of our time, we actually had a cell phone with us. More often called "portable" phones back then, they weren't really in common use yet, but we owned a couple of them for project work. It was one of those giant brick phones, and it would get really hot in your hand if you talked for long. We thought it would be a good idea to have it with us. So I dial 911, and it went something like this:

me: I want to report a dead body that we just found.
911: What's the address?
me: Uhh, there is no address. I'm on the barge canal.
911: Where exactly are you calling from?
me: A canoe in the barge canal.
911: Can you give me an exact location?
me: Exact, no, but we're about half-way between Buffalo Road and Chili Ave.
911: Are you sure its a body?
me: Based on smell alone, yes.

A few minutes later she called back:

911: The rescuers should be approaching soon, but they will have to be on foot. They're asking you to make yourself visible so they know where the body is.

I wanted to say leave the rescuers out of this, it's too late, and just tell them to just follow the smell, but I didn't. Something about the oddness of the situation made me want to crack jokes. After about ten minutes our little isolated spot, which was not accessible by vehicle, was crawling with firemen and cops. They quickly had a guy don a wetsuit, climb a ladder down into the canal (about 15 ft. below the edge of the bank) and wrestle this rotten corpse into a basket. The unlucky guy was named Scotty and you know he was the newest guy on the force. They kept yelling encouragement: "That's it Scotty! Great job Scotty!"

Once the job was done, we continued on our way but I don't guess we got a whole lot done after that. I spent time on the phone later with the police and got a call from the D&C that night, asking for details. The reporter said her editor boss, when he heard the story recounted later that afternoon, told her to call me because it sounded weird to him that someone would have a portable phone with them in a place like that. Times have changed.

The victim turned out to be a guy who ran away from a halfway house and they ruled it accidental but I heard through the grapevine they suspected suicide. A sad story to be sure. We shared a headline with him the next day:

[click to expand]

All this jazz

2008-02-17T06:35:00.000-05:00

Sunday dawn. I don't know why I'm up so early on a Sunday. But I find this early hour, once I get some coffee in me, to be really pleasant. Up early because I want to be, not because I have to be. And it's even better because I have McCoy Tyner live on the headphones. Nothing like some uberjazz to speed up the rising of the Sunday sun. Although from the looks of the sky as it lightens, it's just going to vary in it's grayness, and begrudge us any sight of the sun. Yesterday was the opposite, with sunny blue sky in abundance. Of course I was in the office most of the day, wrestling with the project from hell. I really oughta be in there today as well. We shall see. There's been too much of that lately.
+ + + + + + +
It's now 10:45, and I've been to church and back. The sky is now spritzing small cold drops. But McCoy is back on, helping me fight off the pall this kind of weather brings on. Fine, fine jazz. It took me a long time to learn how to listen to jazz. My father listened to jazz a lot when I was a kid. Stuff like Ahmad Jamal and Oscar Peterson. Jazz vocalists like the Four Freshman, who gave Brian Wilson his basis for harmonies. So it was there, I was exposed to it, but I wasn't really listening. Like any kid in the 60s, it was the Beatles and the Stones and all of the pop radio hits that put music up front in life. Pop music is easy to listen to, usually conventionally structured and predictable (verse/chorus, verse/chorus, bridge, verse/chorus). It satisfies quickly. On to the next tune.

But jazz is obviously different, and you have to work at it. It came very slowly for me. The fusion bands in the 70s like Weather Report, Mahvishnu Orchestra, and Chick Corea were stretching things out without being too avant garde so as to turn off my young ears, and I dug them heavily. They had enough rock and pop elements to work for me. Miles Davis was a little too far out for me, usually. I knew a lot of people who were listening to other stuff but I wasn't tuning in much.

Eventually I turned around on it and came to appreciate the satisfaction that exists in letting yourself hear what jazz artists are laying down. For me that ability was probably fostered by listening to the Grateful Dead for all those years. Their long jams were jazz in a rock setting and format. It was all improvisation, noisy and intense at times, poetic at others. A lot of people didn't like that part of their shows, but I did, and I guess I was really becoming a jazz fan during those years without realizing it. Now I've grown into a different mind set.

And I'll say without hesitation that I still struggle with the really far out stuff. But at least now I can listen to it, and give it a shot. I've learned to relax into it and let it show you where it's going. There was no better example of that than this year's Rochester International Jazz Festival, where the newest venue, the Reformation Lutheran Church hosted the "Nordic Jazz Now" series. An entire week of bands that offered very unconventional, experimental, challenging music. Difficult stuff. And I found myself loving every one of them. I tried to sit up close, where the sound was as much directly from the instruments as from the P.A. I became very engaged in those shows. I hope there is more of that this year.

But I'm still a jazz neophyte. Fortunately there is a planet full of jazz music out there with enough gravity to keep pulling me in. McCoy Tyner is currently doing a great job of that. His music is actually pretty accessible. He rocks.

[Andrea Pettersen Quartet at the Church-photo by RIJF]

2008-02-13T22:55:00.001-05:00

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Brothers, Sons and Pearl Snaps

2008-02-10T00:09:00.000-05:00

About three years ago on a Friday night I sat down and sent this e-mail to a handful of people after going out to hear a band:
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I left work early today to pick my son up at school and move him home for the summer. After loading up the van with a dorm room's worth of goods and unloading it at home, I checked my work e-mail to see if anything important came in after I left. There was a note from Diamond Dan, which he'd sent to a few of us in the office:

================
"Subject: Bastard Sons Of Johnny Cash......
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
...........tonight at Milestone's @ 8:00. I can't remember who's opening but they are also a fine act. I will see you all there, and I've got your first two beers."
================

I had never heard these guys, but remembered reading about them, and I thought their name was so cool. So I cleaned up and hit the road.

The crowd was sparse when I walked in and there was no sign of Dan or anyone else. The opening act, The Dead String Brothers, a six-piece from Detroit, were already in gear. The frontman was a thin guitar player who brought to mind Beck. The Brothers also had a sister, a big black-haired beauty in very tight jeans who sang harmony. They were firmly entrenched in the alternative country genre, a Wilco/Uncle Tupelo/Whiskeytown amalgam, but still with their own sound. The pedal steel player gave them a nice feel - it was music to drink beer by.

Pearl snaps were prevalent on stage, what with everyone wearing western shirts. As I looked around, I saw there were a bunch of them offstage as well. A tall, thin guy standing next to me had a really gaudy western shirt with all kinds of embroidery that would have been at home underneath one of those Nudie western suits. A long-haired fella, he looked like a graying Jesus ready for line dancing. He was already pretty wound up, hooting and hollering even during the ballads.

After a few tunes the Beck look-alike said the next song was dedicated to a guy they met last night in Buffalo named Ernie, who apparently had gotten pretty excited when they played what Beck called "a relatively obscure cover tune", and they were going to do it again tonight. They broke into the Band's "Get Up Jake." The long-haired guy just about lost it, raising his hooting and hollering to a new level. I figured he must be Ernie. I had to interview him, so after the band was done, we had a chat. He was indeed the aforementioned Ernie from Buffalo, and it as it turns out a personal friend of Levon Helm and Rick Danko. Or so he said. He had come from Buffalo with a bunch of his buddies, who were also starting to hoot and holler, God bless 'em.

The Bastard Sons took the stage after a quick equipment change. They were a four-piece band, and each sported a western shirt, complete with snaps. The frontman played acoustic guitar and sang all of the songs, and the lead guitar player worked the same telecaster all night. This guy was good. Really good. He was the only easterner in the band, hailing from Connecticut; the rest are from California. They did what seemed to be mostly original tunes, with a smattering of Johnny Cash (Long Black Veil & a hepped-up, ska-based Ring Of Fire), Waylon Jennings & the like. I found it to be very satisfying music, and the more they played, the better they got. That improvement was partially fueled by a line up of whiskey shots on the edge of the stage that slowly disappeared one-by-one.

The opening band came out and sat next to me at the bar during the Bastard Sons' set, and had a few shots of their own. After a while, the black-haired beauty had unsnapped her top three pearl snaps to reveal a black bra, and she and Beck got more and more friendly toward each other after each beer chaser. The Buffalo boys hooted, the Bastards rocked, the pearl snaps shone, but Dan never showed. They closed with a rousing version of Viva Las Vegas that would have made Doc Pomus proud.

W.E.C.

2008-02-09T12:09:00.000-05:00

I came upon my old copy of the Last Whole Earth Catalogue (1971) and I couldn't not pick it up and do some page flipping. About 440 pages (the original Catalogue in 1968 had 64 pages), oversize, black print on what were once fairly white pages but are now brittle and flaxen in tone, especially around the edges.

It was an amazing collection of tools and information on an indescribably large array of subjects, and it really put the world at your fingertips, or at least made it readily available via the U.S. Post Office. You could order wheels and tires for your motorcycle, or a book on intelligent life in the universe by Carl Sagan. You could order instructions on how to build a windmill, or just buy a windmill itself. Moog synthesizers. Geodesic domes. Books on language. The Art and Practice of Hawking. Woks. Anvils. Boat toilets. Spinning wheels. It's all there. Not just the products themselves (which you generally ordered from other sources, not the WEC), but a seemingly infinite number of sketches, photos, figures, descriptions, testimonies, addresses, listings, all assembled in a way that resulted in no two pages being laid out alike. Sometimes there were random associated notes like, "Warning: funky generators eat fan motors," from the section on giant inflatable structures. It had many letters from readers and users, one of my favorites being from a guy who claimed he cured his warts with a swiss army knife and voodoo: "They now have more or less disappeared leaving only gaping holes and volcano-like craters on my calouses...."

The catalogue was the brainchild primarily of Stewart Brand, who said it was largely inspired by the ideas and teachings of Buckminster Fuller, the iconoclastic and visionary designer slash inventor slash all around outside-the-box thinker. Steve Jobs, in a commencement address at Stanford University said about the WEC: "This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions." Stewart Brand went on to be somewhat involved in the evolution of the internet, as a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He's also involved in many other ventures of intelligent and unusual approaches to life on "spaceship earth" as Fuller tagged it.

If you had a burning question about something back in the late 60s or early 70s, your search for answers didn't involve a keyboard. But you might have gone to the bookshelf and pulled down a volume of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, or maybe the WEC. Flipping the pages of the catalogue was tantamount to today's web surfing.

When I first delved into the catalogue I read the built-in novel called "Divine Right's Trip," by Gurney Norman that was printed in the margin of each page. It was a story of a hippie in a '63 Volkswagon bus (named "Urge") and his mobile adventures. I read it during my trip across the country in my '66 Volkswagon bus. That was not planned. One of these days I'll re-read that story. Right now I've got to brush up on the many culinary benefits of the cattail, as described by the late Euell Gibbons. Of course I may need to also educate myself on how to make a flint cutting tool, so I can efficiently harvest the cattails. Then maybe I'll see if I can still get my hands on How To Keep Your Volkswagon Alive, a book once offered by the Catalogue for $5.50.

[mine looked like this, only more funky]

Words

2008-02-02T09:14:00.001-05:00

Tom Waits can write.

His growl of a singing voice can belie some of the most heartfelt lyrics you'll ever hear. My friend Rick gave me a copy of his annual compilation CD, "On A Winter's Afternoon," which had a version of Waits' "Day After Tomorrow" sung beautifully by Linda Thompson. It's written from the point of view of a soldier who is essentially one day from finishing his tour of duty, and he's writing a letter home. This song is simple, straightforward poetry that somehow conveys volumes about war, life and death. It's not just clever wordplay; too many songwriters get caught up in cleverness. We're talking about an average joe, who's just trying to look out for himself and get back home, and the words serve that concept perfectly. But his thought process captures the much bigger picture of man/God/country and how that ends up in the lap of a grunt like him.

"I just do what I've been told,
we're just the gravel on the road....
and only the lucky one's come home
on the day after tomorrow."

He repeats the "day after tomorrow" phrase at the end of every verse, six times in all.

I don't think he makes it home.

Full lyrics: [http://tomwaits.lyrics.info/dayaftertomorrow.html]

I blew it

2008-01-30T07:08:00.000-05:00

A local PBS radio person was reporting on the high winds this morning and urged me to “take a safer route to work.” Foolish me, here I was taking my normal route to work when I should have taken the Calm Corridor. Damn, I always forget that.

Opposable thumb

2008-01-26T00:54:00.000-05:00

I went into the city tonight to hear a little music from Watkins and the Rapiers – one of my favorite local bands. These guys have a really unique take on music – they are their own band and beholding to no one, as they do mostly original stuff. They throw in the occasional cover –tonight it was The Band’s “It Makes No Difference”, a decades-long favorite of mine and without a doubt the best vocal performance of the late Rick Danko’s long and distinguished career as a singer – but mostly it’s music under the Rapier’s influence, no matter which of the members’ compositions they are playing. They don’t shoot for a highly polished sound, but that doesn't mean thay aren't accomplished, just loose. They go for a fun and almost frivolous feeling, and have lyrics with substance. Another really endearing quality of theirs is that they find a way to keep alive the stylings of The Colorblind James Experience, the trombone being a key element in that aspect of their sound. It was a good night and some close friends unexpectedly turned out, the kind of night that the local music scene cultivates repeatedly. I wish I could take advantage more often.

I left at a reasonable hour, and headed back home. I got off the expressway as I always do and as I buzzed on down the feeder road to my normal turnoff I saw a van alongside the road, pulled completely off the pavement onto the grass, in spite of an oversized curb. Flashers were going, and already dimming and slowing a bit, it seemed. I slowed way down myself to see if someone was in the van, but didn’t spot anyone, so I kept going. About a quarter mile further I blew by a lanky guy slogging along in the snowy grass off the highway, carrying what looked like a gas can. I did a quick stop and backed up to him, rolled down the window and asked him if that was his van back there? He said, in a disgusted voice, “yeah, that’s me.” I asked if he wanted a ride and he said “sure,” and jumped in. Right away he introduced himself and asked my name and stuck out his hand, and it was obvious from the handshake he did manual labor. He began thanking me profusely for stopping, and said that he lived just up the road, and that he was “in big trouble with his girl” because it was so late (it wasn’t even midnight yet). He continued, almost ad nauseum, to thank me for stopping, like he couldn’t believe someone would do that.

I started rambling about how when I was young, hitchhiking was a very common part of life. I was hitchhiking all over the place when I was just a very young teenager, and never thought twice about it. It was a perfect way to get around. Free, reliable, fun even. Weekdays after school to my buddy’s house, Friday night to a party, Saturday afternoon to a pickup football game. It didn’t matter, you started walking and put the thumb out. It wasn’t even really called hitchhiking – you’d call it thumbing a ride. And it always came through for you. It was a given. Old ladies would pick me up. Some people would go well out of their way to take me where I was going.

I thumbed out to Indiana, twice. Adventures, both times. Kinda like this, only without the breasts:

My own van broke down in Sioux Falls South Dakota and somewhere in central Oregon; both times the thumb got me to where I needed to go to get parts for the repairs. Each time, another bonus adventure ensued.

Around 1980 when I was going to school in Geneseo, I stayed late at school one night studying for a test. After midnight I walked to the edge of the village and stood under the last street light before the road led into the darkness of the country stretch between there and Avon to the north, where I lived. It was a cold night and I stood for nearly an hour and none of the handful of cars leaving town stopped. I started walking, thumb still out for any passersby, but nobody pulled over. I walked and walked and ended up hoofing the whole nine miles that night. That was one of the last times I hitchhiked.

I pulled into the lanky guy’s driveway and he hopped out, but not without thanking me one last time for “this Samaritan act,” as he called it. Kind of made me sad that something that should still be a normal part of life is pretty much gone. Thumbs down.

A wee hour encounter

2008-01-19T01:32:00.001-05:00

Sitting at the kitchen counter, with the laptop, 1 AM. Headphones on, but no music at the moment, just a dim electronic hiss waiting to be upstaged by a song. I hear a muffled howl, like a dog of some sort. Annette must have the TV turned loud upstairs, I figure. She's sleeping, so I'll go turn it off, I figure. I get up, but the bedroom is dark - no TV. I hear the howl again, but much louder and clearer without the headphones on. I've heard it before so I bolt outside. Coyote.

We live in a village but we're on the fringe, and my yard backs up to a woodlot beyond which are some open fields that are loosely connected to other fields that are out in the country. I've seen one of the bastards in my backyard in daylight, which is disconcerting because I have a small dog who is perfect happy-meal size. I walked to the back of my yard to the edge of the woods to listen. This guy is just beyond the woodlot, in the row of pines alongside the small playground back there, maybe 200 ft. away. He seems to be alone. And he's fired up: bark bark howl, bark howl....bark bark bark howl. The moon is 80% full, wispy clouds running by, cold as the devil, crusty snow underfoot, long shadows from the trees on the silver ground. Real Hound of the Baskervilles stuff. He howls once more, but it sounds like a slightly different spot this time and it gave me one of those serious spine shivers. Then I hear leaves rustling like now he's moving in the woods, and closer. That's all I need to hear, and I hightail back inside.

I got that shiver once before in Canada, at Timberwolf Lake, early 70s. A several-day canoe trip deep into the woods, including portages up to a mile long. Me and Gilmore and I think one other guy. One of those trips where we really achieved that sense of isolation that we always went for back then. The moon was also big that night, it was calm, and a pack of wolves set to wailing for quite a while, and I'll never forget that scary-ass sound because it gave me that shiver. We went back to that lake years later hoping for a rerun but it was a windy night and we never heard the wolves.

When we first moved to this house, there was a pair of great horned owls that must have resided pretty close by because they'd hang around and hoot back and forth to each other every 3rd or 4th night. But they left after a couple of years and never came back. It was a nice county touch to our village setting that was too short-lived. So it's nice to hear something like a coyote once in a while, just to help offset the psychological impact of all the gigantic clear-cutting developments this town is fostering lately.

His presence don't befront me none, but he better leave my dog alone.

Buk

2008-01-16T22:08:00.000-05:00

A typical night, after dinner, finds me once again on line. It starts with e-mail, then usually moves to a simple search for a song or band or some music-related tidbit. But inevitably it leads here, then there, then over there, and on and on until a simple desire to learn one thing finds me having already forgotten 13 things that I only just learned.

Such a thread tonight landed me on Charles Bukowski, the low-rent LA writer, poet, fighter and lifetime drunk. I was only fleetingly familiar with him (mostly via the movie Barfly, which he wrote, autobiographically, and I dug), but an hour of clicking and skimming has landed me now among the ranks of his admirers. That's the internet for you. Instant education, fascination, gratification. But I can see I'm a long way off from really getting what this guy was about. Kind of LA's answer to Burroughs, maybe, but who generally chose booze over heroin. Some people called him a Beat poet, but it doesn't look like there was any real connection between him and the Beats. He was fascinating, and a tough guy, but it still amazes me that somebody that led that hard of a life lasted to the age of 74, and it took leukemia to bring him down, not drink. His gravestone even reflects his persona a bit:

Burroughs', on the other hand, just alludes to his craft:

(image compliments of http://www.findagrave.com/)

Marge's

2008-01-13T22:17:00.001-05:00

In November the small swing bridge over the outlet at the north end of Irondequoit bay, which is closed in favor of boat traffic all summer, is swung back to accommodate cars all winter. On any given winter night when I’m out and headed for home I generally pass up the big bridge over the bay and keep heading north in favor of the small bridge over the outlet. That brings me to the stop sign at the north end of the Sea Breeze Expressway, where one comes nearly face-to-face with Marge’s Lakeside Inn. Nine times out of ten I’ll turn right and head across the bridge into Webster. But on that tenth night, I pull over, park and head into Marge’s for a beer.

The owner Fran sits at the door, scrutinzing all flow of bodily traffic in and out of the place. Fran is a sizeable woman, wears a fake flower in her hair (think Lola at the Copacabana) and wields a big magnifying glass in her hand. All the better to read your ID with, my dear. If you don’t have gray hair, you get proofed. I walked in unchecked.

This is a tiny, tiny bar, so no matter where you park yourself, you are never very far from any other patron. Being on the beach, such as it is on Lake Ontario, I guess that dictates that the theme be tropical. The barroom is dressed up in a beach hut motif, with grass and palm fronds and bamboo in abundance. A 2-in diameter hemp rope lines the front edge of the bar; the rope and the bar surface are coated with a 1/4-inch thick layer of acrylic. A fishnet covers the ceiling behind the bar and contains all manner of knick-knacks. And if this isn’t enough to set the mood, Marge’s has gone the extra mile with lighting. Like the special orange lights that backlight the specially-arranged bottles filled with the specialty liquors. And a miniature mirror ball shoots tiny shards of light across the bamboo-covered ceiling. But my favorite effects are the few small and strategically-placed black lights. The black light is alive and well at Marge’s. If you’re wearing anything light colored, you glow a bit. Not blinding white iridescence like a 70’s disco, just a warm glow. A white-toothed smile, if you're lucky enough to have one, goes a little farther in Marge’s.

This place is a study in oddities and contrasts. I sat watching a group of hot young girls come in, 20-somethings, with fresh hairdos and stylish clothing. As they ordered drinks, the Kingston Trio ca. 1959 played on the jukebox. The floors have a steep slant, probably the result of being built on the loose sandy soil. You can have trouble walking even before you finish your first drink. I walked uphill into the bathroom where I was greeted with more black light and a healthy dose of glowing white paper labels on the wall with catchy sayings like “Goodbye Tension, Hello Pension,” and the inexplicable “Guns Don’t Kill People, Drivers with Cell Phones Do.”

There is a jukebox, old style, with one-hundred A-sides and one-hundred B-sides. The song population is primarily the work of Fran's daughter Francine. Heavy on the country with lots of old rock and roll and odd pop songs mixed in. She hand-wrote all of the labels, many of which list the B-side song as “yuck.” Francine calls it like she sees it. She was at the bar this night, engaged in heavily besotted conversation with someone for most of my time there. Eventually two young girls came in, chatted with mama Fran briefly, then proceeded to slowly guide Francine out the floor to take her home. Her happy hour was finally over. I have a Marge’s t-shirt that came into my possession one night a few years back after talking music at the box with Francine. She excitedly opened the storage room where I had many colors and sizes to choose from, and now I have a memento of an earlier night spent in the glow.

Looking at an old jukebox is a flashback for me. I worked in a bar and grill back when I was a 20-something, and I did a little bit of everything at the place, including keeping the jukebox stocked with songs. Every couple of months my sister, who was a waitress there, and I would head over to a place called Rochester One-Stop for some new 45s. One of my other jobs was morning cleanup. At 8 AM I’d unlock the jukebox, flip open the front panel and key in my favorite tunes as a soundtrack to my sweeping, mopping and scrubbing. Then after an hour or so a small group of old, alcoholic village regulars would shuffle in for their morning constitutional of a shot and a beer. Or maybe two. It was a ritual, all set to a scratchy vinyl rock and country soundtrack.

Marge’s big stereophonic masterpiece called for 25-cents a song, five songs for a buck. I dumped in four quarters but the machine decided I was only worthy of three songs. I carefully picked them out but never heard a single one. While I was pushing buttons, Toby Keith’s “I Love This Bar” came on. As I turned and headed back to the counter, the drunk woman next to my stool was smiling at me and bobbing up and down to the song, nodding her head, as if to say “yeah baby, great choice, I love this bar too.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her I hate Toby Keith. And besides, the truth is, I do love this bar.

Sound

2008-01-13T17:12:00.000-05:00

I was working in the yard this afternoon, still trying to catch up on leaf raking and garden cleanup that usually happens in the cool weather after Thanksgiving but which was preempted by the early snow this year. 'twas a totally overcast but mild day, with essentially no wind. Still air is tolerable at almost any temperature. A 10 degree day without wind is a delight. Today was in the 40s so it was almost ideal for working outside.

When the air is this calm, sound travels really well. At one point I heard the train whistle from the main line that slices through Fariport and East Rochester. The sound source seemed almost due south, so I'm guessing that was an at-grade crossing either right in the Village in Fairport, or the next crossing at O'Connor Road. That's over seven miles away. I have heard it before, but not very often, even though trains go through several times a day. I can also sometimes hear planes take off at the airport, which is 13 "crow miles" away.

The atmospheric conditions must have been ideal for the soundwave travel to be so efficient. I think it takes a temperature inversion for that to happen, that is, a warmer air layer exists over the surface layer, which is the opposite of typical conditions. That warm layer acts as a ceiling of sorts for the sound waves, which keeps them concentrated near the ground. At least, that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

But there was an abundance of sweet silence (or at least nearly so) and the rake tines scraping the wet ground was the prevalent sound.

Frontmen

2008-01-11T21:48:00.000-05:00

Frontmen come in all styles. I was just watching "Rock Around The Clock" (1956) with and about Bill Haley & the Comets. They had a scene where the Comets played two songs at a dance, and Alan Freed (played by Alan Freed) was seeing them for the first time. The comets were a septet, and tight as can be. They had a very Louis-Jordanesque jump element to their rock. I was ignoring the dancers that were featured in the shot and digging the band. Afterward Freed was talking to Haley and trying to convince him and the band to quit their day jobs and become full-time musicians. It was hokey, 50's-style cinema and dialog, but truly cool, daddy-o. But mostly I was thinking how weird Haley looks and how unlikely a frontman he seemed. He was not destined to become "The King." Maybe he needed a sneer.

On the other side of that argument, though...Van Morrison was no Jim Morrison - he's maybe 5 ft. 5 in. tall and kind of funny looking but that never stopped him.

(sidebar - The Platters did "Only You", all dressed up in white suits. Truly suave.)

Initiation

2008-01-07T19:07:00.000-05:00

I don't know just what this blog will eventually contain but I guess it gives me a place to spew when I feel the need to do so. I'm not a writing machine, and don't have the need to empty my head daily. But on occasion I get the urge to string together a few sentences and I guess this gives me a place to do it. And no doubt recycle some of the stuff I've conjured over the years.

"I've got a head full of ideas
that are driving me insane"

- bob dylan

(Damn, just out of the gate and I've already quoted two lyricists. Luckily they are my two favorites.)