Week of March 27, 2006
Part 1 21:12
Grateful Dead 12/28/89 Oakland Coliseum Arena
JUST A LITTLE LIGHT
LET IT GROW
Part 2 34:38
Old and In the Way
MIDNIGHT MOONLIGHT
Interview: ALAN DALTON, author of Old and in the Way Banjo Songbook
Old and In the Way
PIG IN A PEN
KISSIMMEE KID
LAND OF THE NAVAJO
I walked into the breakfast room at the Holiday In Express. There was one other couple in there, and I asked them if they’d mind if I turned off the TV. It was tuned to the Oxygen chanel, showing a movie, and no one was watching. No problem, said the couple.
As I ate my cereal, a hotel maid walked in, turn on the TV, tuned it to Fox News, and started to walk out of the room. She caught my eye, noted my distress, and – I don’t remember exactly what she said and what I said, but rather than turn it off she switched it to The Weather Channel.
I just wanted to scream, “DO WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO THIS NAZI PROPAGANDA?” She must have seen that on my face anyway.
(I caught a little bit of Fox News Channel in the breakfast room yesterday, too. The anchor-fellator was on w/ Dan Bartlett, and he began his interview by joking that he had asked Helen Thomas to write his hard-hitting questions. Then, of course, he went on to ask Bartlett how these goofy liberals have the nerve to suggest that the president is “dangerously incompetent.”)
It got me to thinking. Is it in thye hotel worker’s job description to turn the fucking TV set on? Does her church or NRA chapter or someone else encourage her to tune the damn TV to Fox News?
Never mind the greater question of why there has to be a fucking TV set on and blaring crap in every public space?
Guest host: Tim Lynch
Jack Straw
Althea
Mama Tried >
Mexicali Blues
Friend Of The Devil
New Minglewood Blues
Deal
Music Never Stopped >
Franklin’s Tower – Grateful Dead 3/13/85 Berkeley Community Theater
True Religion – The Duhks
Treat Me Right - Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, Nothing But The Water
Chain of Fools – Darol Anger’s Republic of Strings, Generation Nation
Trouble on the Levee – Digney Fignus, Trouble on the Levee
Ruby >
Robots! >
Ruby! – Yonder Mountain String Band, Mt. Tracks, v. 4
Really nice interview with Bobby, by Brita Belli, in the Fairfield County Weekly. An excerpt:
Fairfield Weekly: In [the film] Festival Express you come across as the innocent, naïve 22-year-old. Was that train trip a turning point for you?
BW: Well, it was a great ride, I’ll tell you. It was the ride of a lifetime. As far as a turning point, not really. It was a great party.
FW: Alcohol seemed like the only unknown element.
BW: For a lot of us, that was the case. Actually, it was something of a discovery. We all got looped.
FW: What kind of influence did the other musicians have on the Grateful Dead and your music?
BW: I guess that train trip was kind of influential in that we all got together and traded licks… There were a few songwriters that I became aware of like Kris Kristofferson; he had just written “Me & Bobby McGee” and that tune was making the rounds during that train trip. I think I learned of Jackson Browne on that trip… Aside from that, I knew about country music, I knew about jazz music, I knew about blues and rock ‘ n’ roll, and I’d been sort of pursuing all those. Most of us had been. I was acutely aware of what Miles Davis was up to at that point.
Jon Carroll, in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, offers a very angry and personal take on the latest front in the culture wars: “gay adoption.”
According to the Catholic News Service, “Catholic Charities of the Boston Archdiocese announced March 10 that it will stop providing adoption services rather than continue to comply with a state law requiring no discrimination against gay and lesbian couples who seek to adopt…. Prompted by a similar issue arising at Catholic Charities of San Francisco, a top Vatican official has said Catholic agencies should not be involved in adoptions by same-sex couples.”
To which Jon Carroll responded:
Last year the Ford Motor Co. started to buy ads in several publications aimed at gay readers…. Then the company got assaulted by the American Family Association, a creation of the Rev. Donald Wildmon, a clever right-wing agitator with a hate-based agenda. So Ford announced that it would stop advertising in gay publications.
But then, whoops, Ford reversed its reversal and said, never mind, it was going to advertise in gay publications after all. So then a representative of the AFA announced that it was reinstating its boycott. “We cannot, and will not, sit by as Ford supports a social agenda aimed at the destruction of the family.”
What a vile sentence. What a vile sentiment. What overbusy, underbrained worms these people must be. I am not yelling.
My older daughter is a lesbian. She is also the single mother of an adopted child, working to make and sustain a family with jaw-dropping tenacity. I am a member of that family, but she is the head of it. The idea that any part of her social agenda involves the destruction of the family is insulting and stupid. She adopted a child, which means that a child who would not have had a home now has one. It means that a child who would not have rested safely in a mother’s arms now does so. These are real family values, not the poison spouted by these thoughtless, gossip-mongering abominations.
All over this nation there are gay and lesbian families working hard to make a life for themselves and their children. I know a few of them. They could have done it the easy way, stayed in the closet and decided not to endure the hassles of having children, but they didn’t. They wanted a family. They wanted a lover and companion to share their lives with, and they wanted children to love. And for this they get insulted by cretins….
The people who hate America are the members of American Family Association and its ideological fellow travelers. They’re the ones who do not believe that all people are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. They’re the ones who believe that this country was founded on hate and fear; they’re the ones who want the hate and fear to continue.
“Where’s Daddy?”
“He’s out picketing a funeral of a gay veteran.”
“Will he be home in time for the flute recital?”
“Your father is very busy, dear.”
I mean, render unto me a break. If your family feels so threatened by my family that you think you have to organize a boycott of a car company, then your family has problems my family can do nothing to solve.
In other news of religious evil, a man is on trial in Afghanistan for converting to Christianity. He faces the death penalty if he doesn’t reconsider.
Trial judge Ansarullah Mawlazezadah told the BBC that Mr Rahman, 41, would be asked to reconsider his conversion, which he made while working for a Christian aid group in Pakistan. “We will invite him again because the religion of Islam is one of tolerance. We will ask him if he has changed his mind. If so we will forgive him,” the judge told the BBC on Monday. But if he refused to reconvert, then his mental state would be considered first before he was dealt with under Sharia law, the judge added.
Week of March 20, 2006
Part 1 27:44
Grateful Dead 12/28/89 Oakland Coliseum Arena
GOOD TIMES
FEEL LIKE A STRANGER
DIRE WOLF
LITTLE RED ROOSTER
Part 2 28:36
Grateful Dead 12/28/89 Oakland Coliseum Arena
RAMBLE ON ROSE
QUEEN JANE, APPROXIMATELY
Grateful Dead 3/28/94 and 4/4/94
THE DAYS BETWEEN
This “Days between” composite first appeared in GDH 297 (May 30, 1994).
From Ron Tavernier in Fairbanks, Alaska (posted with permission, of course):
Hey, hope all is well in your neighborhood. Spring is rapidly approaching up here. A balmy 15 today.
Anyway, how would I get GDH online. Our classic rock station used to carry it, but doesn’t anymore. They may have picked it up again, to tell the truth. Haven’t listened to them in a few years.
A big thank you by the way. I always have a place in my memories for your show. I was an avid listener 12 – 16 years ago while I was a ski-bum in Vermont. Used to catch it on Burlington VT radio every week.
In 94 I drove the Alaska Highway all the way to Fairbanks for a year of college. Wasn’t sure what I would find and was a little hesitant to pack it all up and leave a comfortable life.
As we got within 30 miles of Fairbanks in a fully loaded down 82 Buick Skylark, we knew we were going to make it. “4:20″ hit and we decided to try to get a Fairbanks radio station. We were able to pick up the classic rock station.
As we pulled into Fairbanks and passed the Welcome to Fairbanks sign the Grateful Dead Hour started and your voice and beautiful music filled the air. I knew I had found a home. I will always remember my first impression of Fairbanks was colored by the greenery we had enjoyed and the music you provided. I have been here since.
Thanks.
Ron Tavernier
(If you’re in a part of the world that doesn’t get the Grateful Dead Hour via broadcast radio, email me and I’ll tell you how you can get it online.)
A friend pointed me to a story on jambase from Michael Kang (String Cheese Incident) and Chris Berry (Panjea), who are traveling in Africa, and this quote in particular:
I highly suggest all of you leave the Unites States at some time soon to remove yourself from the “psychic net” our government has craftily woven over our psyches. I imagine that I am preaching to the converted, but when you get away to see other parts of the world, it becomes painfully obvious how insane our way of life is in the US. Even though most people will take you at face value when they meet you, it’s obvious that the whole world is watching us in disbelief and amazement at the seeming apathy that has stricken our society. The concept of not voting is pretty foreign to most South Africans. I try to persuade the people I meet that there is a silent revolution happening in the States that is gaining strength, but the more I say it, the more I realize that it’s time for all of us to really stand up for what we believe in and manifest change. I know that many of us are doing exactly that, and I just want to let you all know that I will be here to help in any way I am able.
The following is distilled from several WELL posts by my friend and musical buddy Rik Elswit (and posted here with his permission, of course). It concerns a house concert by Michael Smith that we both attended on February 26:
Listened to Michael Smith, a wonderful veteran singer-songwriter from Chicago, at a house party yesterday. The party was a gift to our friend Drew from [his partner Jen], and a bunch of us chipped in in secret to get Smith, Drew’s favorite singer-songwriter, for it – but it wound up being a gift to us all. It was an absolutely superb afternoon of music and story, and it was a pleasure watching a man who has spent his life mastering his craft.
I’ve known of the guy by word of mouth for over 30 years, but this was the first time I’d actually heard him, and I was just floored by the quality of his songs and his low-key, deceptively simple, delivery. The songs are rich, complex, melodic, and dripping with great lines, with an incredibly diverse set of references. You have to bring some awareness and a college education to the party to catch them all. In fact, I felt flattered that he assumed I’d done the required reading. He has a novelist’s ear for character and nuance, and all of it is backed up by a very subtle, simple-sounding, but actually quite complex guitar style rooted in swing, blues, and urban folk.
Mike Smith, like his pals John Prine and the late Steve Goodman, comes from a school of early-’70s singer-songwriter craft that was a huge influence on me. One of its most important features is the ability go go from hilarious to poignant to stunningly sweet all in the space of three songs. Not a speck of cereal in that show.
It’s rare to be as captivated as I was by that performance. But I shouldn’t be surprised: Mike Smith, Steve Goodman, John Prine et al. pretty much established the paradigm of singer-songwriterdom for me when I was a pup in he early ’70s, although Smith did so indirectly via Goodman (who recorded “The Dutchman” and “Spoon River,” and played other Smith songs in concert). But I hear a lot of Goodman in his sound and manner, which is to say there was a lot of Smith in Steve, too.
Noting that Smith used nothing but the standard guitar tuning in the performance we saw, Rik added:
“I learned a lot watching him. He had this great way of moving up the neck using open E, A, and D strings as pedal tones to hold it together. I do this a lot in E and A. He taught me how to do it in G, using A and D as pedal tones when he’d be playing V chord (D) forms up the neck on the high strings.
I bought both of the CDs Smith had for sale, and I guess Rik did, too:
The more you listen to it, the more you hear. At first I was lulled by the apparent simplicity and it took me a bit of time to hear the musical, lyrical, and rhythmic complexity and the stylistic variety. My current fave (they change with the time of day) is “The Ballad of Elizabeth Dark” which sounds to me like what you’d get if Springsteen went to college in the late ’50s-early ’50s. And my language maven wife just loves his wordplay.
Listening to that album after having seen the show underlines, for me, the level of craft involved. Michael Smith has a well-honed act based on a character he’s invented and inhabited, also named Michael Smith. It’s like watching Leo Kottke. The first time I saw him I just enjoyed the show. But after having seen him several times I could see the structure of what he was doing and I developed a new appreciation of just how much work was involved in crafting the artifice. And I liked him even more.
It’s nice, getting a present for somebody else’s birthday.
The two CDs I bought have some overlapping content, but both are entirely worthwhile. I guess if you’re only going to get one, I’d start with Live at Dark-Thirty. But Such Things Are Finely Done is well worth the money, too.
Here’s a sample of the lyrics of “Zippy” (which is on both CDs):
Sun zips up sun zips down
Zippy little clouds zipping over Zippytown
Palm pilots pagers beepers
Faxes and such
Folks in Zippytown are down with
Keeping in touch
Barreling in their SUVs passing on the right
Zipping through the zippy day
Zipping through the night
Zippety-zip they get the jobs and money
Zip they have the kids
Zip they in the coffin
Folks is zipping up the lids
And speaking of lids manLife gets pretty zippy
When you quit doing weed
