Me and the Georgia Potlickers: Buddies or Just Good Friends?

How little I know...

I have been guilty of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning.

I assumed that the rhythmic emphasis on the second and fourth beats in bluegrass and country music arose out of the similar emphasis in jazz -- boom-chucka, boom-chucka. How wrong I was...

In my research for this book I've been listening very hard to a couple of collections of very early country recordings, "The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of," a set of extremely rare 78s of blues and proto-country; and Harry Smith's magisterial "Anthology of American Folk Music," which was perhaps the most important factor in the rise of the folkie movement in the late 50s and early 60s.

These records are, needless to say, astonishingly evocative.

But the most amazing thing about them is that it becomes instantly clear that country music had that boom-chucka beat long before jazz was a factor in rural life. If I'd thought with any clarity about it, I could have come to this conclusion without immersing myself in these collections; I'm not unacquainted with these tunes.

What bluegrass did was not to appropriate a rhythm from jazz; what happened instead was it took that rural dance-beat, and sped it up and gave it that wonderful drive that makes it such a compellingly toe-tapping medium, where the banjo is free to do all that great riffing a good picker can do.

(No insignificant thing, that fifth string. I'm doing a whole chapter on it.)

So the question becomes, When did this music acquire this beat? You don't hear it in "authentic" recordings of Celtic or even any other European folk music -- not so far as I can tell, anyway. Is it African? More listening sessions in store, methinks....

Another stunning thing is how much larceny went on in the first half of the twentieth century. I'll be humming along with Dock Boggs' "Country Blues" (1927) and it will suddenly hit me: Bloody hell, that's "Darlin' Corey"! Up comes John Byrd's "Old Timbruck Blues," and it becomes eminently clear where Bill Monroe "acquired" "Molly and Tenbrooks."

This is capital fun. Why didn't I think of this unemployment dodge earlier?

ALCS, Game 7

This has bugged me for years....

I'm not a sports freak. I don't obsess over the box scores; I'll check 'em occasionally, but not very morning. I don't know every batting average in Major League Baseball.

But I do have a little bit of accumulated knowledge of baseball -- enough to know that somebody's last 12 at-bats are an absolutely meaningless criterion in judging his dangerousness at bat. A far better standard is the batter's whole-season record.

So why -- please god, why!?!?!? -- do the television people insist on giving us completely useless information? I don't give a blistering fuck what a guy has done in this series; I want to know what he's done in his last 600 at-bats. That would give me some useful data.

All that said, in the second inning, Boston has this thing sewed up. Varitek just bounced one off the tippy-top of the Green Monster, and Dice-K looks unhittable.

The mortgage-equity money looks safe.

Before the Shit Went Down

This past weekend, before The Shit Went Down, I took a jaunt up to Bobby Lightfoot's joint in Western Massachusetts. He's been going through some relationship shit, and I wanted to soothe his brow with wet cloths and place hot poultices on his chest. What's a brother for?

Bobby's living in a fantastic house-sit in the Berkshires. Gorgeous view. Would have taken a picture but my camera-batteries were fried. House is stuffed full of great musical instruments, a grand piano, drum kit, some ten guitars, every amp you can imagine, and Bobby's got them all miked with mindbendingly great condenser mics. He's got his recording gear all perfect, and he flies around on this digital eight-track at speeds approaching that of the sound coming out of his NS-10s.

Beforehand, we'd discussed doing a short little recording project while I was there, just for snicks. Since we do form a brother act, we considered a few songs to cover that featured close harmonies. We settled for a bit on the Fabs' "If I Fell," until it occurred to me that, with our perverse shared sense of humor, it would be more fun to do the Rutles' parody, "With a Girl Like You."

So we did. Enjoy, won't you?

With a Girl Like You (pops)

Guitars and low (shaky!) harmony is me. Bobby sings the confident vocal lead, and plays drums, bass, percussion, and the piano in the solo.

Boy knows his way around audio, I tell ya. I have never made recording that's anywhere near this ballpark.

White Rover

Commenter JC (a very old pal from college) reminds me of an incident that bears recounting here...

It was about 1979 or so. We were spectacularly dissipated sophomores, taking far too many drugs and drinking ocean-loads. Just... horrible.

On a holiday break, JC kindly assented to let me bum a ride from New York to Boston to visit my girlfriend, who was sharing a flop in Aliston with a quite-good rock band called The Zoo Types. (Reading this back, it occurs to me that I was kinda hip in those days...)

JC's parents owned a late-Sixties Rover TC2000 -- a car you don't see much, and which you didn't see much even then. Though common in Britain, the Rover didn't get exported to the States; so if you wanted to own one, you really had to work at it. There might be 500 of them in the country now.

When we were stationed in Finland, my parents drove a Rover TC2000. "TC" stands for "Twin Carburetter," in case you're interested. I imagine the "2000" is the engine size in cc's. Not a particularly powerful car, but British cops used them; I remember a TV series called "Zed Cars"; I was particularly chuffed to see my parents' car being used in car chases.

I suppose my affection for that car is of a piece with my purchase of that 1964 Triumph bike; I will go to my grave believing that human civilization hit a high-water-mark in the mid-Sixties, and it's been a long, slow slide down the crapper ever since. I saw a Rover for sale in the Giant parking lot in Purcellville last year; I was sorely, sorely tempted to make an offer.

(What, are my neuroses showing?)

So there we were, driving up to Beantown, me waxing nostalgic in this great car. We hit a tollbooth (Mass Pike? Seems likely...) -- and the Rover crapped out. Dead as vaudeville. Neither of us knew a damned thing about engines.

Panic began to set in. Where the fuck were we gonna find a shop off the Mass Pike that can work on a twelve-year-old British import -- and did I mention it was two in the morning?

It was cold. It was late. We were tired. We were fucked.

Then, the most amazing thing happened.

A white Rover TC2000 -- of course it was white! -- pulled up behind us. Guy has tools, parts, I dunno, exploded diagrams. A Rover freak. Loves 'em. Has three. You guys stranded? Here, lemme take a look...

He had us back on the road in maybe twenty minutes.

What are the odds? I mean, seriously, what are the odds?

Life's amazing sometimes.

Well, It Was a Good, Long Run

Eight years, I gave that company.

They kicked me to the curb today.

It was a great beginning. I was gonna be an AOL Millionaire, just like my neighbor Steve, who drove a bitchen Audi and remodeled his kitchen before moving to the nicest house in the neighborhood. The stock split the day after I was hired.

The options I was granted on my hiring are by now utterly, utterly worthless. Have been since just about the day I got them in 1999.

I sat at Jim Bankoff's elbow -- invited as the UI designer who'd drawn the first concepts for a music subscription service that would eventually become the disastrous MusicNet -- as he divided the digital distribution of three-fifths of the world's music with slick-assed snakes from Sony and BMG, in a sleekly metallic meeting-room in CC1. iTunes wasn't yet even a gleam in Steve Jobs' eye.

I attended a Design Summit in Columbus -- Netscape, CompuServe and AOL graphic designers -- where the immortal Rob Raines and about ten designers ran up a $3500 tab at the Columbus Morton's. One guy was so flush with it that he bought a jeroboam of Dom Perignon that was on display -- the kind of thing they put up with a ridiculous price-tag to make the hoi-polloi feel like a Player. Stupid asshole walked around with the huge thing cradled in his arms all night, getting warmer and warmer.

I was there for the big media event consummating the AOL Time Warner merger, what, maybe late 2000. I walked to the cafeteria to get some food; on my way I ran into Ted Turner, bored and hungry, waiting for lunch to be served to the executives. He was fingering a ball-chain blind-puller. He mused aloud for my benefit -- and mine alone -- "Not very high-tech, is it..." The contempt dripping from his voice on the words "high-tech" are something I'll take to my grave.

Oh, I've got stories. Now that I'm no longer a member of the family, and when the dust has settled and I'm safely employed again, I'll get around to telling them.

I'll be able to explain this thing, (last two paragraphs) which I was constrained by professional circumspection at the time from telling.

There's one story I can't tell even after I'm safely employed elsewhere. Suffice to say: The bastards richly, richly deserved their comeuppance.

I had a front-row seat for the Great AOL Train Wreck. And I finally went under the wheels. Can't say fairer than that.

Now, with a few months to relax, I'll write my book, I'll get back on top of the yardwork, put the garden to bed for the winter, ride the Triumph, get that damned Historical Society website hammered together....

I think I'm one of the lucky ones.

---

Some program notes: NeddieJingo at aol dot com is at least temporarily out of service. I can now be reached at hbsherwood at mac dot com. For stupid reasons, the Neddie address won't bounce back, so if I appear not to be answering your emails, that's why. I hope and pray they'll see reason and let the Neddie address become a non-business account, after which things will be back to normal. Should take about a week.

The Land of the Free and the Home of the Extremely Frightened

Washington, D.C., the city of my birth, has been transformed into East Berlin.

This was the thought that struck me this morning when I attempted to park in the underground lot at the (I can barely bring myself to type the name) Ronald Reagan Building to attend a work-related conference in the Mellon Auditorium next door.

The last time I saw anyone use a mirror to inspect the underside of an automobile for contraband was when I went through Checkpoint Charlie between East and West Berlin in 1980. I was reminded of this when it was done to my truck this morning, after I had handed proof of my identity to a surly policeman, who protected the Homeland from, well, from me, by checking out my undercarriage.

Seething slightly from the good officer's presumption of malice aforethought, I descended into the most hellish parking garage I have ever in my life experienced. Descending level after level into this dank, dimly lit, claustrophobic concrete Hades, seeking a place to deposit my truck for the day, I had on the CD player a marvelous recording by Dock Boggs, circa 1930, of a tune called "Old Rub Alcohol Blues":

When my worldly troubles are over
And my last goodbye I've said
Bury me near my darling's doorstep
Where the roses bloom in their bed

Honestly, I began to freak out.

Oh, Jesus, Dock, I thought. You couldn't have known. You died, and anything like humanity, like things measurable on a human scale, died with you. You were at least allowed to have the blues. You could sing about it, and somebody -- even some poor Morlock in a concrete bunker 150 below the surface of the earth trying to find a parking spot -- would hear you, and know what you meant.

And I get... this.

Back on the street again, grateful just to see daylight, I wandered, misinformed, into the Environmental Protection Agency Building to ask for directions. I ran smack-bang into another crowd of surly cops, daring me to brave their metal detectors and magnetic wands. Staring down at me from the wall, smiling like oblivious goons, were the grinning gargoyle visages of both George Bush and Dick Cheney. The Fear sank its claws even deeper into my skin. Having received a reasonably coherent answer to my question from one of the scowling DHS minions, I turned and made to leave the lobby.

As I left, it occurred to me that a photograph of those two hideous, grinning faces on the wall of EPA would make a marvelously ironic memento of an encounter in the lobby of a once-proud agency that those two bastards had done their best to destroy. This idea lasted just about long enough for me to make one impulsive move toward my camera-case in my backpack.

Then I thought better of it.

They'd have had me down on my stomach, knees on my neck, Tasers sparking my spine, cuffs around my wrists, before I knew what hit me.

East Berlin.

I did get to have lunch with Jared Spool, though. That was cool. Nice guy.

Automechanical Royalties

I love being reminded just what a magnificent, gonad-stomping job the Clash did with "Pressure Drop."

And it makes me want to chew broken glass until my mouth is a maw of blood and gore that the thing doing the reminding is a fucking Nissan commercial.

Oil pressure
Oil pressure
Oil pressure gonna drop on you...

The Most Desperate Band

From History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, U. S. Vol. Cav. (Scouts), by Briscoe Goodhart, Company A, originally published in 1898. Goodhart's memoir is the standard volume for students of the Loudoun Rangers, the only militia raised in Virginia to fight for the Union. It consisted mainly of men from Waterford and Lovettsville, two loyalist border towns.

Goodhart's name now honors a road near Taylorstown.

The close of every twenty-four hours demonstrated most fully and beyond question that the days of the Confederacy were numbered and very few, yet the Confederate bands that inhabited Loudoun grew more desperate in their attitude toward the citizens of that county. It was almost impossible for the citizens to keep horses, as bands of guerrillas would take them. In many cases it was known that this stock was appropriated for their own use, although the Confederate government was directly responsible. As early as April, 1862, that alleged government passed an Act authorizing the recruiting of guerrilla bands, who were to receive compensation for their service from horses and other property taken from Union citizens....

Perhaps the most desperate band of this military banditti was John Moberly's, who belonged to White's command, although he committed most of his atrocious deeds on his own hook. He had become so desperate and such a terror to the citizens that Gen. Stephenson, the commander at Harpers Ferry, found it absolutely necessary to offer a reward for his body. A detail of twelve of the Rangers was ordered to the Loudoun Valley to capture or kill Moberly and his band. The band had, at most, about twelve men, although generally only three or four.

This squad of the Rangers learned where Moberly was expected to be, and endeavored to catch him at that place. They concealed themselves and waited, and it was not long before he approached, coming down the road, with drawn saber, chasing a negro boy who was driving a cart. The boy was badly frightened, which Moberly seemed to enjoy. As he approached, our boys rose to their feet and demanded a surrender. Moberly lay down in in his saddle, put spurs to his swift-footed horse, and, making a sharp turn in the the road, darted out of sight. Every one of our boys fired at him at close range, but did not strike him. We were on foot and could not follow, but returned to camp without the coveted game.

To be continued...

The Mighty Deejay

I've always felt this about people who consider such things as mix tapes to be some kind of Art Form.

Get a fuckin' instrument, dope.

Found through StumbleUpon.

Johnny's In the Basement

Easily the funniest thing anybody's taken time out to create for me today...




Thanks, Employee of the Month!

You and Your Pussycat Eyes

It's funny how visceral a connection there is between musical timbre and gutwrenching nostalgia.

Tom Jones' monster hit from 1965, "What's New, Pussycat?" which has been on constant rotation in my mental iPod recently, has this ability to transport me directly -- immediately, without any effort on my part -- to 1966, to my family's living room carpet, my six-year-old face buried in its nap as I listen intensely, the smell of sautéing garlic and onion from the kitchen suffusing the air.

I've been thinking rather hard about what exactly it is about the song's arrangement that's so compelling, and I think I've got it.

Play it along with me, won't you? (Pops.)

Harmonically, the chorus that begins the song is quite mundane, a I-IV-V in C major that's designed to be sung along to. The transition from opening chorus to the verse is also bog-standard, a dip to a D major chord that presages the G major of the verse.

(It's occurred to me now, on re-hearing it, that the song's a bit of a pastiche, intentionally corny, even in its original 1965 context -- designed to evoke the hip-ironic nostalgia that was common in pop music at the time. Perhaps this explains the lack of harmonic sophistication in the chorus -- it's trying to sound dumb.)

It's in the verse that things get interesting. The first line is harmonized with the tonic G: "Pussycat, pussycat," but "I've got flowers" is a B flat, which isn't in the home key. It's precisely that intervalic swoop -- both its harmonic surprise and the jangle-piano-and-tuba timbre -- that sends me crashing back to 1966. I don't know enough about psychoacoustics to say with any precision just why that particular chord change does this to me, but Lordy does it do it! I imagine at some future date, research scientists will isolate the Drooling-Nostalgia hormone or endorphin or whatever it is, playing Sixties pop sludge to 46-year-old men hooked up to machines to see what part of the brain lights up when that B flat chord follows that G.

This nostalgia, for you wee ones out there, is not for the Dirty-Hippie Sixties that everyone seems to think of whenever that decade is mentioned. That chord change doesn't evoke student protest or drugs or Maoist ideology; what that swoop away from the home key brings out in me is what the Sixties promised to be for progressive people who admired style and grace: The Sixties of Steve McQueen, of Audrey Hepburn, of "Blow Up," of Cilla Black and Serge Gainsbourg and sleek hair and great clothes and the utterly gorgeous reverb on Petula Clark's voice in "Downtown."

It was a world that was exploding into color -- you have to be just about exactly my age to have recognized this explosion. The first few years of my life happened in black-and-white -- television, film, print: everything was grayscale. Then, just about exactly the time Tom Jones recorded "What's New, Pussycat," everything just blossomed: Marimekko, Pop art, Expo 67, Mary Quant, the British Invasion -- color everywhere.

Jet travel. Skiing. Bitchen cars and cheap gas. Triumph motorcycles. Soldiers not yet dead in Viet Nam.

Optimism.

It's all in there. All of it. G to B flat.

Burt Bacharach, you magnificent bastard.

PS: Absolutely the best-ever version of "What's New Pussycat?" was done by Bobby Lightfoot's Malarians in 1985. You'll have to take my word for it, but it's true. Played without even a lick of irony. Beautiful.

On the Importance of a Healthy Self-Regard

Some years ago, a couple lived near us whom we liked very much. Slightly hippie, granola-type people who possessed a sense of humor. They had two children, one a very talented twelve-year-old boy, the other a rather precocious two-year-old girl.

It was this girl who was the subject of a story the mother whispered, giggling, to Wonder Woman at the playground where our kids disported themselves. The mom had been changing the little one's diaper. In a state of nudity, freshly wiped down and powdered, the girl pointed to her personal bits and hollered out:

"Yay! 'Ray! Vulva!"

I'm afraid I've never been able to shake that little witticism, and I find myself silently chanting it, like a mantra, at moments of, how shall we put it... Well, the sorts of moments when the phrase is likely to occur to one.

I know just what you mean, little one, and I couldn't agree more.

O Sinner, Do Not Stray

He will, too. Mark my word.

(Later edit: Wear headphones if at work. Wear a bulletproof vest if at the MegaChurch.)

It Godwins Itself

From this morning's Washington Post:

Immigrant Detention Center Proposed in Va.
Facility Would House Illegal Residents Arrested for Crimes Until Deportation

Lessee, here... Country's leaders declare an existential threat from "undesirable" elements they see as usurpers of the national and local economies... Build "special prisons" to hold "those people" -- separate from the non-local-ecomony-threatening regular-guy criminals -- just until they can be "deported"...

I can't think of a single historical precedent, can you?

A Bitter Pill

I note with some acerbity that once again I have been snubbed for a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant.

I don't know why I keep trying, people. I really don't.

Small Personal Note

The book's a go. Manuscript's due at the publishers September 1, 2008.

Now: How do you do one of these things...? I suppose I should go buy some paper, yes, and perhaps some pencils or something...

"It was around Barstow, at the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold..."

What, taken?

Damn.

Think Global, Act Local

As Number Sixteen in the List of Top Virginia Political Blogs, I feel it incumbent on me to bring a matter to your attention. This morning's Washington Post reports that things have sunk so low in political communications that political operatives are trolling local-politics blogs -- and, for crissakes, the comments on the blogs! -- for negative crap to say about their opponents:

A Republican state legislator from Fairfax County has launched an attack ad on cable TV against his Democratic opponent that features unidentified, unverified quotes from a blog.

The ad by Del. Timothy D. Hugo points to a new form of negative campaigning in which information for an attack ad is sourced to comments posted on the Internet instead of more authoritative sources such as news reports or public records.

(I think by "unidentified" they actually mean "attributed to a person whose identity is unknown"; editorial standards have done their own decaying, but that's a rant for another day.)

Now, it occurs to me as a person of a Surrealistic bent, these bravos are playing with fire. If they're going to go wallowing around the Blogosphere snagging convenient-looking
copy for their miserable "attack" ads from anonymous blog comments, I think this provides a marvelous opportunity to plant some mischief among their number. Muddy the waters. Disincent them from such crappy behavior.

I know my own commenters are a talented and creative bunch, and you'd no doubt love to see your handles mentioned in some vile, reality-distorting right-wing attack ad. So most of you aren't in Virginia -- who ever said that was a requirement? The fact that I have commenters from Australia and Italy and, for all I know, even Maryland, shouldn't deter us from what I'm beginning to think of as a Holy Quest:

Get cited in a vicious right-wing attack ad.

You see where we're going with this, right? Ad runs, we snap off the Dada mask (mine's a Pierrot made entirely out of laminated goat-butter) and denounce the dupes from the highest rooftops.

Here's a list of Virginia Democratic politicians up for office this year you might vilify anonymously. Pop over there, pick a name, pop back here and slander away.

Remember, these calumnies have to be quotable. Believable. And make the kind of slimy right-wing operatives who troll blog posts for local politicians perk... up... and... whinny.

First Jingosphere commenter who makes it into an ad wins an ice-cream cone.

OK, I'll get the ball rolling:

Margaret Vanderhye, Democratic candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates in the 34^th District representing McLean, Great Falls, and parts of Herndon and Vienna: God, she'd so raise your taxes! Kinda slutty, too. Bad for the 34^th, bad for Virginia.

Cook It Like a Man

Now that school has started, and Wonder Woman is shuttling Betty to a school rather far away, it has fallen to me to assume the duty of Family Chef.

I don't mind this at all; while no foodie, I'm quite a good cook. I haven't heard any complaints yet.

Tonight's main dish is a Beef Stroganoff, and as it simmers quietly away, I thought I'd share my recipe for one of my favorite repasts, which I was reminded of while preparing the Stroganoff....

What You'll Need
1 1.5-2 lb Slab of Beef. Top round, chuck roast, it's all good.
Flour
Oil or butter for sautéing
Salt
Your favorite beer

Cut the beef into bite-sized chunks.
Flour the chunks.
Fry 'em up. Don't overdo it. A little pink in the middle's even better.

And stop right there. You're done. Eat standing up, at the stove, preferably with your fingers. A little dash of salt for the chunks make them even more delicious. Drink the beer as you see fit. Two? Three? Nothing I can do to stop you.

I swear, I've eaten half my family's dinner like this. And I had to force myself to stop before eating it all.

My Beloved Washington Reagans

Something has been bothering me a bit, this young football season.

Universal opinion seems to be that Philadelphia lost Monday night's game against the Washington Reagans. Donovan McNabb, weak offense, yadda yadda, Philly boo-birds, on and on.

The game I watched, I didn't see Philly lose.

I watched Washington win.

I saw a young but rapidly improving quarterback with an absolute cannon for an arm make some great (and, admittedly, not-so-great) decisions, great throws (that TD to Chris Cooley at the half was a corker); I saw a three-pronged running attack (Portis, Betts, Sellers) that was formidable -- fourth in the league right now. The O-line is a little vulnerable and patched up (watching Jon Jansen get his ankle dislocated in Game One was wince-inducing), but have given up only three sacks so far.

The defense is vastly improved -- ranked seventh in the league now; nobody gave them enough credit for making McNabb -- and Westbrook -- look a little sick. (About time that favor was returned. God, it's been painful rooting for Washington against Philly during the McNabb Years...)

And wonder of wonders: they appear to have a reliable kicker!

And best of all: I know it's early days yet, but they seem to have shaken off that spooky tendency to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with boneheaded on- and off-field moves.

Still loathe that pinheaded little ratfaced weasel of an owner, o' course. Won't ever like him. But enough hope begins to stir in the breast that a small still voice deep within begins a tentative little chant...

We...want...Dallas...? We...want...Dallas...? We...want...Dallas...?

Don Henley Must Die

I had this poster. Seriously. Prized possession.

I may have mentioned before that I have quite forgiven myself for liking Jethro Tull when I was thirteen. The Sex Pistols weren't even yet a gleam in Malcolm McLaren's eye, and Elvis Costello was still punching cards in FORTRAN for Elizabeth Arden. Particularly before the whole silly Elizabethan-Boogie thing, Tull was really quite a fine band -- their first two albums, made when they were a mere blues band with pretensions to good songcraft, are still rather listenable. Our local PBS station has a Celtic-music show on Sundays that I'll occasionally listen in on (not a major fan of the thick-sweatered "authentic" music, me -- too repetitious) called "The Thistle and Shamrock," and it amazes me how many times I'll notice that Ian Anderson lifted huge swathes of his mature output, lock, stock, and two smoking Uilleann pipes, from that music.

Today, I had a perfectly decent early-Tull song utterly ruined for me.

There I was in a quiet moment at work, idly clicking the Stumble! button, when up came collection of really-quite-good essays on applied music theory by a fella named Ger Tillikens. One of them is named "Locked Into the Hotel California," about the chord progression in that loathsome song by the loathsome fucking Eagles. Tillikens uses the song to make fascinating (to me, anyway -- YMMV) points about the Dorian mode and something I'd never heard of called the "twin-tone system."

During the course of the discussion, he lets drop the bomb that the authors of the Wikipedia article about "Hotel California" note that the verse's chord progression bears an amazingly exact resemblance to -- be ready to have the song ruined for you -- Jethro Tull's "We Used to Know," from their second album, "Stand Up." In a footnote, he notes that Ian Anderson knows damned well the song was lifted from him; "in a BBC radio interview [Anderson] once laughingly said that he was still waiting for his royalties."

For the record, the verse of "Hotel California":

i - V - VII - IV - VI - III - iv - V

"We Used to Know":

i - V - VII - IV - VI - III - II - V

Awwww.... fuck.

I hadn't thought about that song in years, but I have great affection for its memory, and many was the time that I played mad air guitar in my shuttered room to Martin Barre's workout in that halcyon year 1973.

So I came home, pulled out the CD, and... Oh yeah. Larceny-a-go-go....

Try it for yourself. They even lifted quite a bit of melody from it. You can sing "On a dark desert highway/Cool wind in my hair" right along with "Whenever I get to feel this way/Try to find new words to say," and it fits right in. I'll never be able to hear the song the same way again.

Fuckin' Eagles. Is there no end to their evil?

Jethro Tull's "We Used to Know." (pops)

Free Firewood!

This afternoon, a thrillingly beautiful early fall day, I was sitting on my screened porch squirreling away on my book proposal (now submitted, cross fingers) when the very fabric of space-time was rent in twain in a single moment of shocking violence.

Well, perhaps that's putting it a bit strong. What happened was that the serene silence of the sylvan, rural afternoon was smashed by several enormous cracking noises. My first, panicked thought was that some firecrackers we have in the garage, left over from a rainy July Fourth, had somehow caught fire and were exploding. Of course, if they'd caught fire, then that must mean the garage is on fire and -- omigodtheTriumph!

I raced uphill around the house, to find the garage quite thoroughly unengulfed in flames. The afternoon peace up here seemed quite unrent. Then I looked into the orchard and saw rather more vegetation than I am used to seeing there:


A tree, a damned good-sized one, had seen fit to end its existence on this beautiful Saturday. It was a breezy day, but hardly the kind of tempest that knocks trees over. No, I think the poor thing was depressed and simply decided to end it all.

Miraculously, it managed to miss just about everything it could have killed. The blueberries are (thank Osiris!) unharmed, it missed two apple trees and an Asian pear, the compost heap, and missed the garage by a country mile. A damned polite suicide.

But here's the truly astonishing part:


(I'm having iPhoto trouble with this new laptop, forgive the rotten photo quality.) What you see here in the lower left is a stone wall, which a reasonably expert person told me dates back to the 1940s or so. I am really quite fond of this wall. Damage to it would distress me greatly. This polite tree had the good taste and discretion to break off exactly six inches above the top of the wall, and in its fall did absolutely no damage to the wall whatsoever!

Believe it...or not!

Now, I told Wonder Woman that we'd have to get professional help to clear this tree, it was plainly too big a project for a single homeowner to handle, and her sarcasm on the matter of my purchase of a rather pricey new chainsaw this spring was what you might call withering. But that trunk is two feet in diameter if it's an inch, and we'll need a wood-chipper and a crane and all kinds of gear that I don't have.

But I am going to enjoy splitting all that wood.

Yes, I Know It's Been More Than a Week...

I'm struggling mightily with a Major Life Decision.

A dear friend has offered me an opportunity to submit a book proposal.

What I'm struggling with now is just what kind of book to write; hence my struggle, and my Radio Silence.

It will be about music (the imprint specializes in music), it will be about the Backbeat in American music, its history, origins, and manifestations, about Maybelle Carter's seminal guitar technique (which changed everything about how people play guitar), about Appalachia, about poverty, about spirituality, about... Well. You see my problem.

I've also been deeply ambivalent about taking on such a monumental task while holding down a 9 to 5 Jay Oh Bee. There will need to be time to research, to travel (although I'm not all that far from my subject matter), and to pound out 100,000 well-crafted words in a year.

One other minor matter is that this blog may have to take a back seat. I suppose I can blog the process, but I may (I do know myself well enough) suffer from Writer's Exhaustion and never want to look at a keyboard again at the end of each day.

Help me, somebody.

Do Homophones Secretly Meet in Phone Booths for Synonymous Sex?

Here's a sentence for you:

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

It parses. (A bit tautological, but it parses.) See how.

(Resist the urge to click that link until you've tried to figure it out...)

Later Edit

Some confusion appears to have arisen about the example sentence.

Below, I present a simple Venn diagram that will no doubt clear up any misconceptions.


(Diagram drawn using the tool supplied at Crappy Graphs...)

A Day in the Life in Gettysburg, PA

This knee-weakeningly beautiful late summer day, we Jingos took ourselves to Gettysburg, PA, to get our Civil War on.

It's odd, me being the John Mobberly buff, that we've never done this. It's quite close. We've been to all the big ones in the area -- Harpers Ferry a million times, Manassas, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg -- but never Gettysburg till now.

It's a very humbling place, and my intention had been to post up a sober photo essay on the battlefield. That will still happen; however, something else came up that I've got to get off my chest first.

You can't walk the whole battlefield, it's just too big. (That's one of the humbling things about it, really, imagining this entire stretch of land, from Oak Ridge to the Devil's Den, completely covered, like ants on a rotting apple-core, with thousands and thousands and thousands of men whose sole intent is on killing each other as efficiently as can be done.)

So we bought a CD at the Visitors Center; it contained a narrated automobile tour of the battlefield. We set off to do the tour, but only got about a third of the way through it (that narrator was one prolix son-of-a-bitch) before we all began to succumb to the crankiness that accompanies a rumbly in the familial tumbly.

Abandoning our tour with the promise to continue it another day, we drove into the extremely charming town of Gettysburg. We found a street that promised some passable restaurants, a sort of bohemian street with coffeeshops and hippie-tchotchke emporia. Just as I found a good parking spot and was about to pull into it, I glanced down an alley to my right and saw an absolute brigade of policemen, very much On the Job: They were keeping out of sight down this alley, it was plain, and looking at a particular address with grave purpose on their faces, racking shotguns, readying truncheons, gripping shields.

Holy shit! I believe I said. I'm an excellent example for our children. Look!

I pulled into the spot on two wheels. If it's actually possible to peel rubber while parallel parking, I did it. I really wanted to see what was going to go down. So, once they'd glimmed the circs, did the Fam.

We leaped out of the car as the phalanx of policemen stormed quite literally past our bumper and across the street. They bashed a door in, and piled into the residence, a three-story walkup, shouting lustily, as is the policeman's wont.

(At exactly that moment, a young man was entering the door immediately to the left of the raided house, a small grocery shop. The look on his face as he took in what was happening was utterly priceless.)

Only at this moment did it occur to Johnny Tourism that I had a perfectly functioning digital camera in my hand. So (discreetly, ever mindful that policemen rather object to having their photos taken while in performance of their duties; something about putting their souls in little boxes, no doubt) I began snapping away.

At first there was not much to see. My camera, though a very nice one, has the failing that it cannot penetrate walls.

After a very short while, though, I saw this appear on the roof of the house next to the raided residence. The raided house is the brick one, to the extreme right of the frame. The girl has plainly gone up a fire escape in the back of the house and gotten to the roof, and her intention is to do a Jason Bourne number and get out on the lam:


Be careful! I think I shouted. Incorrigible ghouls though we Jingos are, I had absolutely no desire for me -- or, God forbid, my children -- to watch a woman plunge to her death down a slippery roof. A policeman came out from an alley behind this house, and we all shouted to him, "She's on the roof! Look up! She's on the roof!"

We did this, I like to think, not because we wanted to rat out this panicked girl, but because we were genuinely afraid for her safety. I had a crazy thought of running across the street to break her fall, if need be.

John Law took over, and issued the most insane order I have ever heard from a First Defender: Go back to the window you came out of!

I actually yelled at him. No! No! She just crawled over that dangerous roof! Find a ladder! Don't make her crawl back! I wasn't trying to usurp his authority; I was trying to increase his fund of knowledge so he could make a better decision. I had seen that girl crawl across that roof. He had not.



At this point, Mr. Law decided that he didn't need hecklers, thanks very much, and ordered us sharply to vacate the street. This we did, but not before I got a few more surreptitious snaps. Sorry about the focus on this one. A few of Mr. Law's colleagues:



The girl disappeared from our view as we were following Mr. Law's orders. I got this last shot of her:



We Jingos, our store of adrenaline refreshed quite nicely, thanks very much, wandered down the street toward the restaurants. We stopped and looked back many times, but there was nothing more to see. As we got to the town square, a prowl car passed us. The girl's morose face gazed out the back window.

Thank goodness you're safe, honey.

If I had been advising the young lady on escape strategies, I might have advised her to stay on her own roof, behind whatever chimneys or HVAC equipment might be up there, and make herself very, very small. They were probably after her dope-dealer boyfriend, not her. Once they'd gotten him and vacated the premises, she could have crawled back in, older and quite a bit wiser.

Not that I'd know.

Sin City

I've accomplished a few of the things on the List of Things I Want to Do Before I Die.

I realized earlier this summer that I didn't want to be the guy who, on his deathbed, deeply regrets that he never owned a truly bitchen motorbike. Managed to check that one off the list. I'm a passable guitar player. I've smoked dope on the sacrificial altar at Pisac, outside Cuzco in Peru. I've been paid to write something.

But so far I've never owned a pedal steel guitar.

Dear god, I love that instrument. The way a good player can make it just weep and swoop and wail and cry and boogie and rip your still-beating heart out and show it to you before you die. Jesus Christ, what a marvelously expressive instrument! Desperately difficult to play, quirky as hell (I've been given to understand that the wiring between the pedals and the string-bending mechanism can, in a bind, be replaced with a goddamned bicycle spoke, for all love!), yet its sound is so goddamned archetypically American. It's been wholly appropriated by the Nashville-corporate country hell I think of as "some cunt in a cowboy hat," but it was not always so.

Back in the early Seventies, the immortal Clarence White (of whom a whole adulatory blog-post needs desperately to be scribed) began to show how the "regular" electric guitar could emulate a pedal steel. He and Gene Parsons of the Byrds (not Gram, but Gene, the drummer) cobbled together a bizarre aftermarket mod for a Telecaster called the "B-bender," which allows the player to pull the B string sharp by pushing down on the part of the guitar held by the forward strap. Like all lovable and cranky human inventions, it's weird and beautiful, and in the hands of a master player, it gives some great pedal-steel effects. (You can hear it at work in the live parts of "Byrds (Untitled)," one of my favorite albums in all of time and space.)

The emotional effect of the pedal steel -- the whole "weeping" effect -- is accomplished by bending some strings upward or downward while others remain stationary. What this achieves is the sound of movement within a chord without a change in the chord's tonality. (To be pedantic, it also allows you to change, say, a IV chord to a I chord by simply stretching a string.) You can do this to a limited extent on a standard guitar by pulling some strings sharp while leaving others unbent -- what we guitar-floggers call a "double-stop bend."

And sweet Jesus on a stick do I love doing double-stop bends. It makes me one with my idols.

Here I've put on my Nudie Suit and taken on one of the great Kozmik-Kountry anthems of all time, the Flying Burrito Brothers' "Sin City." As far as the original is concerned, it's probably the "Purple Haze" of pedal-steel culture, with Sneaky Pete Kleinow just shredding the conventions of the genre. My version, while rather less radical, shows how the standard guitar can at least vaguely emulate the pedal steel's immense tonal palette.

So, without further academic ado,

Sin City (pops)

As you listen, you might want to consider how utterly amazingly this anthem, written for the Nixon years, applies to our Present Circumstances...

Rick Danko Forever

While working, I've just been streaming an old gig from the ConcertVault. It's The Band at Carter Barron Amphitheater, August 16, 1976.

It has occurred to me that "It Makes No Difference" is the single saddest song ever written.

It makes no difference where I turn
I can't get over you and the flame still burns
It makes no difference, night or day
The shadow never seems to fade away

And the sun don't shine anymore
And the rains fall down on my door

Now there's no love
As true as the love
That dies untold
But the clouds never hung so low before...

The eye-misting misery is not helped by the knowledge that half the guys playing it are dead, one by his own hand.

Through the miracle of Audio Hijack, here it is... (pops)

Somewhere in the mid-Eighties, attended a Rick Danko solo gig at the Lone Star Café in New York. I arrived way early to get a good seat at the bar. As I was nursing a beer and waiting for the action to start, Danko strode in through the front door, carrying a guitar case. He nodded hello to the bartender, and disappeared into the back rooms.

Perhaps a half-hour later, two men in suits also came into the bar. One of them flashed a badge at the bartender. As they were only feet away from me, I heard the whole conversation.

"Detective Hungadunga, NYPD. We're looking for Mr. Danko."

"Ain't here."

"He's supposed to play tonight."

"Ain't here."

"When do you expect him?"

"Don't know."

"Tell him we'd like to talk to him."

"All right."

And they left. I have no idea why these flatfeet wanted to talk to Danko, but I bet it was damned interesting.

The gig was great. And he sang "It Makes No Difference" beautifully, just him and a guitar.

Not a dry eye in the house.

Those Are Her Jugs

Apparently, I have become, through no effort on my part, the Internet's Leading Purveyor of Kate Hudson Porn.

Not the hardcore stuff (although any links to naughty QT movies would never go unappreciated), but the Kate-in-her-panties-and-camisole-with-Gibson-Les-Paul kind. Long ago, I posted a still from "Almost Famous" to illustrate an amusing correction in the print edition of the WashPost. Now, if you perform a Google Image Search on Kate's lovely form, absolutely the number-one return is that pic.

Golly, I wonder if Kate ever Googles herself...?

Dear Mr. Jingo,

I just noticed you posted my pic on your cute little blog. Now that I'm at a loose end, I'm looking for a midseason replacement. Is that guy on the bagpipes really you? Your totally hot. Wanna do cyber...?

I wouldn't have known about this signal honor, but for the fact that my traffic pretty much quadrupled overnight on Monday. I mean, just blam! At first I thought Wolcott or PZ Myers or somebody really big had linked to something, but when I went into the individual stats it was just relentless image searches, all of them to that Kate pic. I was flummoxed -- I'd seen plenty of these searches before, but never in this volume.

Wonder Woman enlightened me. The Owen Wilson thing. The lummox mooned after Kate, driving him to the most desperate act a man can perform: The Failed Hollywood Suicide.

Well, Owen, you lantern-jawed chowderhead, you have driven her into my arms!

In for a penny...

These Are Your Jugs

These are your jugs:


And these are your jugs on drugs:


Any questions?

Third Gear

She does something in third gear. She taunts me. She's the mistress, and I'm the slave.

Wind me out.

Yes, mistress.

Come on! Wind me out!

I'm trying!

Come on, you miserable worm! Try harder!

Her accent, of course, is pure Sarf London.

The acceleration is incredible. And it just won't stop. No matter how I try, I can't get to the top of third gear. Fourth always beckons, a warm, comfortable place where the taunting stops, the mistress is placated.

I don't even dare to try and see what kind of mistress fourth gear is. We'll stay on polite nodding terms. No offer of service forthcoming from me. No demands from her.

I do know that at 65 mph, I've got a whole lot of throttle left, maybe 4500 rpm, and the mistress purrs like a kitten.

In Which I Invent Instant Messaging

I had a summer job in the late 70's at the US Embassy in Madrid. No, not the one where I was the Ambassador's watering system, this one was the next summer. I'd gotten some seniority among the DiploBrat Community, and they promoted me to the Consulate, where my job was to type the names of visa applicants into the AVLOS (Advanced Visa Lookout System) machine.

It sounds very grand, but it was damned tedious. The machine was a teletype, a direct line to the database at the State Dept. in Washington where they kept the Big List of Undesirables to whom not to issue visas. In those halcyon pre-9-11 days, the list consisted mostly of old Nazis, Carlos the Jackal, and some other proto-terrorists -- although I was fond of typing John Lennon's name into it. He'd already been given his green card years before, so he had no business being on the Lookout List, but there he was. They probably kept him in there for nostalgia reasons. Nostalgia for COINTELPRO. You know.

The consulate closed in the early afternoon, and after that there wasn't much to do. I began to dick around with this machine, and discovered that it didn't communicate only with Washington. With a little jiggery-pokery, it could be made to send messages to any consulate on the network.

With one of these old teletypes, as you typed, a tape would come spitting out of a punch-machine. You'd then feed that tape to a reader, which would convert the punched holes into the text of your message. Unbelievably cumbersome it was, and loud too: chunketa-chunketa-chunketa. You still hear that noise sometimes in newscasts -- it was the sound of modern communication!

I picked Tel Aviv for some reason. Maybe it was at the top of the list or something. Typed up a tape: "Hello. How are you? I'm the AVLOS Operator in Madrid. Who are you?" Fed it to the hopper. Giggled a bit.

Five minutes later: chunketa-chunketa-chunketa... "I'm Beth. I'm a student on my summer-job. I work the AVLOS machine in Tel Aviv..."

Well, hel-lo, Beth!

OK, so...what do you say back? Well, what the hell else am I gonna say?

Chunketa-chunketa-chunketa....

"What are you wearing?"

Didn't hear back.

I Loves Me Some Good Crackpot

Yep. Still avoiding work.

If you're in the same boat as me, perhaps you'd enjoy as much as I have poking around at this site. You need to grok the birth/death dates in the page title to get what's going on.

I love the dude's earnestness, and the facial morphs he does in "Undeniable Proof that Paul McCartney was Replaced with a Look-Alike" are winningly goofy. "The King Is Naked" is some marvelous reading, too -- if you enjoy the Wall-eyed Paranoid School of literature as much as I do. (Scroll down about a quarter of the page for the Loony to begin.)

To this day, my absolute favorite fact that arises from the "Paul Is Dead" hysteria is that Fred LaBour, the man who was most responsible for its spread in America, later became Too Slim, the bassist from Riders in the Sky. Absolutely true.

Approaches to the Bard

Today, as I wandered the halls, dreaming my little dreamy dreams and avoiding work, I was quite amused by the idea of Hamlet soliloquies being delivered by Crocodile Dundee:

O, thet thees too too sulid flish would milt,
Thawr, ind resolve eetself eento a dyew!
Or thet the Iverlarsting hed not feex'd
Hees cenon 'gynst silf-slawtah! O God! God!
How weary, style, flet and unprofitable
Seem to me orll the uses of thees wuld!

This branched out. Peter Lorre as King Lear:

Blow, winds, [oily giggle] and crack your cheeks!
Yee caat-a-racts and hurricaaaaanoes, rage! Blow!

Mayor Quimby:

Two of the, er, fairest stahs in all the, er, heavens
Having some business, do, er, entreat her eyes
To, er, twinkle in their spheres till they, er, retuhn.

Al Swearengen:

He doth bestride the narrow world
Like a fuckin' Colossus, and we petty cocksuckers
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves fuckin' dishonourable graves.
Cocksucker.

(Actually, that last one reads pretty good, doesn't it... I can really hear Al saying it...)

Well, it beats working.

Why White People Clap on One and Three

The times being what they are, and my emotional state being what it is, I'm engaged in a process of catharsis. In that spirit, I've taken on the ineffably pleasant chore of recording a version of the Flying Burrito Brothers' "Sin City"; could there be a more perfect song for Life Under Bush? "This old earthquake's a-gonna leave me in the poorhouse/It seems like this whole town's insane..."

Now, I thought I knew country music pretty well. I've owned a banjo since 1984, and nearly everything I know about guitar playing ultimately has its roots in country. When I pick up a guitar and idly play it, what usually comes out is at least traceable to country, if not the thing itself.

So when I listened to my efforts with "Sin City," I was rather taken aback to find that I just wasn't feeling it. Something was, well, just wrong about it. It was too waltz-y, it didn't swing the way it should.

So I did what I should have done in the first place, which was to listen to the Burrito Brothers' version; I'd been operating from memory, and not from the magnificent template set down by Gram and the Boys. And what I heard was an absolute revelation.

The song's pedestrian beat is a waltz, no question about it, but you wouldn't know it from the rhythm section; they steadfastly refuse to acknowledge waltz-time. The rhythm guitar plays a ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta eighth-note figure, and the bass walks on the waltz beat, without accenting the one. I'd been playing the rhythm guitar in waltz time -- boom-chuck-a-chuck, boom-chuck-chuck -- and the bass as your standard country one-five, one-five on the first beat of each measure. That was why my recording was so weak.

It's a ubiquitous country beat, but I've been beating my brains out around the Internets to try to figure out what it's actually called. Here's a snip from Patsy Cline's "I Fall to Pieces," which, while not a waltz, is a good illustration of what I'm talking about:

I Fall to Pieces (pops)

Now, there are thousands of country-songs that use that loping beat, especially from the Fifties and Sixties, and it's also the core beat of lots of New Orleans music as well, Fats Domino and that ilk. It's also the essence of ska as well -- that music came about as a result of Jamaicans doing their own take on country and R&B. You can sing "My Boy Lollipop" right over "I Fall to Pieces" and it fits perfectly.

But here's what blew the top of my tiny little head off. Not long ago I raved about Paul McCartney's walking bass in "All My Loving," saying I couldn't think of a pop song from before it that used the bass that way. Well, go ahead, give it a try: Launch that Patsy clip again, ignore the harmony and just hear the beat. "Close your eyes and I'll kiss you..."

You just never stop learning, man.

(I'll post up "Sin City" when it's done, but one other tragic flaw has revealed itself to me: I am not now, nor have I ever been, Sneaky Pete Kleinow.)

Max Roach, RIP.

Once, at the Pori Jazz Festival in Finland, about 1974 this would have been, I watched Max Roach enthrall a sophisticated audience with nothing but a high-hat and a kick-drum. For, like, ten minutes, those were the only things he hit. Regular downbeats on the kick, and just mindbending stick-work on the hat.

It was utterly spellbinding.

I'm so glad I got to see him live. I'll always treasure that memory.

Close Your Eyes and I'll Kiss You

It's fascinating how many times the early Beatles started off their songs without an instrumental introduction, with a solo voice crashing into the song. Think about it: "Can't Buy Me Love," "It Won't Be Long," "Any Time At All," "No Reply," "You're Going To Lose That Girl," "Another Girl," "I'm a Loser"-- all these songs jump you right into the musical action, often leading with the vocal hook. It's as though they consciously considered it a part of the Beatle Formula, the thing that made the Beatles the Beatles. I think it's quite telling that when the group began to tire of being the Four Lovable Moptops, along about 1965, they began also to subvert the Formula; I can find only three songs from the second half of the Beatles' output that start that way: "Penny Lane," I Will," "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?"

(Huh. Whaddya know. All McCartneys.)

I'm sure the radio had a great deal to do with this musical practice. Deejays (back when we had such things and not corporate robots) like playing songs that start with a crash; it provides an effective punchline for their patter. The Fabs were never loathe to exploit the medium; they spoke often of "needle time," showing acute awareness of the need to get to the hook as early as possible in a song before boredom set in.

My favorite Beatle song that starts this way is "All My Loving." Listen along with me, won't you? I've put up the live version from the Sullivan show, for the simple reason that it's the only digital version I have:

"All My Loving" (pops).

When I was a teeny-tiny li'l Jingo, in that halcyon 1964 when this song -- and indeed the whole world -- was new, I didn't possess a particularly well-developed sense of human interaction. To me, this wasn't a boy-girl song at all; the lyric, it seemed to me, could only be a Mommy singing to her little boy who she's being forced to abandon. How could it be about anything else? (Excuse me, are my anxieties showing?) My first reaction, then, was that this song was ineffably, indescribably sad.

Later, when I'd grown up a bit and realized it was about lovers temporarily separating, I came to reconcile the gloriously cheerful setting with the lyric: It's not a sad song at all! But, listening to Paul 's lovely vertical melody, I still hear traces of melancholy, particularly in the downward-arching second line of the verse ("Tomorrow I'll miss you...": a beautiful match of lyric and melody).

Many factors combine to make this song so catchy. Paul's walking bass (surely an innovation: I can't think of an earlier pop song that uses one), Lennon's rhythm-guitar triplets (lifted, it would seem, from The Crystals' "Da-Doo-Ron-Ron," which was in the charts when they recorded "All My Loving"), Ringo's subtle swing (I've heard studio takes where it was more exaggerated; the effect in reining it in is enormous), and George's great Carl Perkins-inflected lead work; all these combine to create a frothy, joyous texture. I absolutely love how they reserve the Everly Brothers harmony singing (by George in the performance we're listening to; by a double-tracked Paul in the studio version) for the last verse; it gives the song new life just as it appears to be winding down.

Harmonically, the arrangement is utterly brilliant. Starting the song on the second degree of E major (F sharp minor) allows for all kinds of artful ducking and feinting as to where the tonic actually is; we don't finally get to know where "home" is -- that is, what key we're in -- until the last note of the verse.

I'm surprised to find two sources (one being the composer himself) that say it was written at the piano rather than the guitar. As John plays the rhythm, the harmony lays out with a perfect guitaristic logic. Here are the chords for the verse:

     F#m           B7
Close your eyes and I'll kiss you,

E           C#m
Tomorrow I'll miss you;

A          F#m         D     B7
Remember I'll always be true.

     F#m        B7
And then while I'm away,

       E          C#m
I'll write home every day,

     A           B7        E
And I'll send all my loving to you.

What utterly blows me away -- the Beatle Genius at Work -- is that feint in the direction of A/D in the third line. It's so goddamned unconventional a thing to do -- a IV of IV, who the hell does that? -- but it's exactly what you might try if you had noticed that that A chord was giving away the game of hide-the-tonic that McCartney plays with this verse. It's a musical head-fake, pure and simple. You think you know what key we're in? Think again, Chuck-o! Woop, where's your jock?

Notice also that the tonic E is played in the verse, on the words "tomorrow," and "write home," but it doesn't establish the tonic at all; it could be the seventh degree of F# minor, the dominant of A major, the subdominant of B major -- everything's gloriously ambiguous until that ending cadence, which resolves not only harmonically but lyrically as well. Fan-fucking-tastic.

They (literally) don't make songcraft like that anymore.

Oh screw it: You can watch the Sullivan performance if you want. I wanted you listening, not watching.



By the way, if you like this Beatle jibber-jabber, check out Alan Pollack, whose shoes I am not fit to lick.

From the Repressed-Memory Files

It's possible you are not familiar with the huaso. That's quite all right; very few people outside of Chile are. The huaso is to the Chilean imagination the direct equivalent of the gaucho in Argentina, and, indeed, the American cowboy. He is a tough son-of-a-bitch, a great horseman, a terrific dancer, and a cherished national symbol.

There exists among the huasos of central Chile a strange and terrible legend, the kind of story that they tell around dying Andean campfires as the pumas rage in the darkness just outside the campfire light, and the chicha bottle has made many rounds. It is the story of the Insane Naked Hermit of Cerro el Colorado, who lives in abandoned silver-shafts, kills with his bare hands, and eats the flesh of the living. His fearsome powers are so great, it is said, that knives clank impotently off his naked chest. It is also said that only three men -- three very lucky men -- have ever seen him and lived to tell the tale.

It is a fascinating little piece of folklore, one that might have had its origins in a Mapuche Indian tale, or perhaps an old Spanish legend brought over with the Conquistador Pedro de Valdivia. But a folklorist attempting to trace the story to those origins would be barking up the wrong tree indeed.

I do in fact know the true origin of the tale, and I will tell it to you now.

In the year of Our Lord 1975, your correspondent, a stripling of fifteen summers, living in Santiago with his diplomat parents, fell in with a rather ambiguous crowd. Outwardly health-conscious and active, given to camping and skiing and taking advantage of all the marvelous natural bounty that Chile had to offer from roiling Pacific coast to lofty Andean aeries, yet they were likewise fond of some of Chile's other, less savory (or legal) delights. Packing for a jolly Vandervogel tramp into the mountains for botanical and geological exploration (so delightfully curious, these youngsters!), they might be prone to include in their fashionable Kelty backpacks a flagon or two of Johnny Walker purloined from Dad's cache from the Embassy Commissary, or even perhaps a rather bulging package of the delicious product of Chile's hemp farms, from which an eyeboggling amount of really fuckin' primo contraband could be extracted for the price of a pair of Levi's donated to the watchman, who was only too glad to look the other way for a half-hour. (A win-win: Capitalism at its best.) (By the way, I never did this. Burros from lo Barnechea were more than happy to do it for you for a portion of the takings. Mom.)

It was on one of these salubrious and educational three-day jaunts far into the mountains, and perhaps after Taking the Hempen Sacrament, that your correspondent decided to set off on a short jaunt alone, away from the larger group. The day was utterly glorious (they all were in those days), and I found myself on a promontory overlooking a wandering mountain stream of snow-melt fifty feet below, miles and miles and miles from any human thing. The breathtaking Andes stretched away endlessly to Argentina to the east, and to the west the smog of Santiago lay in a carpet at my feet. The sun shone delightfully, and I removed my shirt to let the rays caress my back, my 1975 Freak Flag tickling gently my shoulders. That felt so good that the trousers soon followed, and presently I was as naked as the day I was born, lying blissfully soaking up the gentle rays.

After uncounted time like this, I became hungry, and, remembering some Kraft Mac-and-Cheese in my backpack back at the camp, stirred and began to prepare to return. Then a devilish thought occurred: Fuck it! I'm miles from nowhere! Who needs the clothes! I dare ya!

And so it came to be that I began to descend this marvelously remote mountain trail wearing absolutely nothing but a pair of Keds. I don't know about you, but I've had dreams where I could take enormous bounds effortlessly, covering miles with each step, and that is what that mountain trail, ever descending toward Civilization yet endless miles from it, felt like. I began to leap from rock to rock, from switchback to switchback, a veritable mountain gazelle, stark raving naked. I may have had a song on my lips; the memory has faded. Probably something from Jethro Tull.

Then, it happened. There's a particular sound effect that they use in old cartoons, when a character has to stop extremely suddenly; it's the sound of overfilled tires skidding from a sudden violent application of the brakes. That sound effect, I am prepared to testify under oath, emitted from my Keds when I rounded a corner.

They were perhaps ten yards from me. Three huasos. Leading a train of pack-mules laboriously up the trail.

Oh, they saw me. You bet your ass they saw me. I couldn't have been more visible if I'd shot up a fuckin' flare.

It is a testimony to the athletic young thing I was in those days that I was able to reverse course, sprint ass back up the trail a good half-mile, before exhaustion set in. I dove into some litre bushes, well out of sight of the trail, and threw my clothes on like my life depended on it. Who knows -- perhaps it did.

I then picked my way back to camp, staying well off the trail until I saw the huasos and their mule-train a long way above me, moving uphill toward Argentina. I can't know what they were planning to tell their friends and sweethearts about what they'd just witnessed, but I bet any number of Escudos it was pretty goddamned exaggerated.

Housework

In the spirit of the Clean Slate, I have done a little housework on the Blogroll. Vacuumed up a few links that have gone dark, feather-dusted some outdated links, and nailed a few new ones to the wall to cover up that ugly stain from an unfortunate Spaghetti Incident.

Cleek should have been in there long ago. He's been popping in here all the time, making with the comments and the wit, and we share us some interests. He's a Chump regular, too, so that should tell you something.

Richmond Democrat is a Democrat. From Richmond. Nuff Sed.

I like the cut of Christopher M. Walsh's jib. He describes himself as a "Chicago-area writer, actor, director and fight choreographer," thereby demonstrating a deftness with a compound-adjective hyphen. That counts.

And Byzantium's Shores is well worth checking out. Anybody who decorates his blog with a hot babe elbow-deep in a book is all right by me.

A Clean Slate

I'm sorry to say, my mood hasn't improved much since my last post. The last item of business I conducted before leaving work was to talk to the IT guy who was working on my dead Mac laptop. The hard disk wouldn't spin up, and he tried extracting the data in raw form, but said, rather pitilessly, that the software he was using estimated the time it would take as "more than a week." My only hope now is an outside data-recovery service, which may be more trouble and expense than it's worth.

I'm going to take this in the spirit of someone whose house has just burnt down, and who has lost all his possessions -- it's a Clean Slate, a time for renewal. In my Stages of Grief, I have gone past Bargaining and am fast approaching Acceptance. I have a lot of work ahead of me reconfiguring this new Mac to get it as well-ordered and useful as the old one, and some of that's actually fun.

It's either that or suicide.

I took Kevin Wolf's advice yesterday and hopped on the Triumph for a head-clearing spin, which worked a treat. I felt great afterward. Motorcyclists, I now find, have a rather puerile custom of waving to each other as they pass in traffic. The technique is not the dullard's hand up in the air, flapping your fin like a circus seal; rather, you hold your left hand down below the handlebar, index finger coolly extended in the direction of your boon-brother-outlaw-of-the-road. With each bike I passed, I couldn't suppress the thought: Cooler than yours. Cooler than yours. Much cooler than yours.

I imagine I'll stop this disgusting Triumphalism (har!) sometime along about the moment I'm stranded in the rain somewhere 100 miles from home, in need of a Whitworth bolt last manufactured in 1968. That's as may be, Brother Outlaw, but mine starts reliably...

Caught the Bourne Ultimatum with Freddie last night. Wasn't expecting much, but was quite pleasantly surprised. Paul Greengrass's direction of action sequences (and all this flick is is action sequences -- when the wham-bang stops and people start talking it's eye-rollingly banal) packs a huge amount of information into bewilderingly fast-unfolding events. But you're never confused; you always have the facts you need to interpret the action you're seeing, no matter how fast it's zipping by. This is by no means a common trait among directors.

I also like Matt Damon's Jason Bourne, who fights to regain his humanity through the series. Unlike, say, Jack Bauer, who, despite all the scenery-chewing, you don't believe for a second has a coherent moral center under all that crustiness, Bourne's struggle is to find not only his identity but his motive in submitting to the torturous program that stripped him of it. He has to work to figure out how to do the right thing rather than killing like an automaton. That he even tries is a testament to his virtue. "Do you even know why you've been sent to kill me?" he asks a hit-man in the climactic scene -- a question that all too many people need to be asked nowadays.

You'll never convince me, though, that 145 71st Street backs onto the Hudson River.

That Was the Day That Was

Yesterday started with a root canal, and rather went downhill from there.

Actually, the root canal was not nearly as bad as I'd anticipated. Back when I got my hip replaced, I made the monstrously stupid mistake of looking up the procedure on the Interweb -- and was utterly horrified at the medieval drawing-and-quartering and carpentry work the thing entailed. Determined not to make the same mistake again, this time I went to the endodontist's blissfully unaware of what to expect. I had imagined that slicing and dicing of the gums were on the menu, but a poster on the e-dontist's wall disabused me of that notion.

The thing involved an endless amount of drilling, but with the copious local anesthetic, the worst part of it was the whining noise inside my head. I went to my Happy Place (3471 Maple Ave., Bradenton, FL, in case you're curious), and emerged from the procedure in a minimum of pain -- the leftover Vicodin given me by the dentist certainly helped there, and with my psychological state.

I returned home to recuperate -- I'd budgeted the day to recover, but found that since the root canal had involved no spilled blood at all, no sutures, no swollen tissues, I was actually in rather fine fettle. After a couple of hours spent reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver (quite good, but haven't formed a firm impression yet), I decided that the new tachometer cable and ammeter I'd just gotten in the mail from Nova Scotia needed installing on the Triumph. So off I trundled to the Land of Grease and Gas Fumes in the garage.

The job done, and happily oily and sweaty, the bike once again starting on first kick, I cleaned up after myself. Whitworth wrenches back in their bag, screwdrivers and box-cutter back in the toolchest, I marched, satisfied, back to the house.

As I walked, I felt a tiny prick in my upper calf, right at the hem of my shorts. Ouch, I thought slightly mindlessly, I've been bit by something. It truly didn't hurt much, just a little bug-bite. I paid it no more mind, went inside, got a tube of Benzocaine from the bathroom, applied same to Affected Area. Sat at the kitchen counter as is my wont in the early evening, played a hand or two of Solitaire as a repeat of the Seinfeld show played on the kitchen TV.

I began to feel an itching where my t-shirt met my throat. It became quite irritating. I felt inside the shirt -- and felt lumps. I scurried to the bathroom to look in the mirror, and found that the area around my throat was covered in hives. It looked like ten thousand mosquitoes had had their way with my chest and throat. And the itching became almost unbearable.

I took a couple of Benadryls, despite their tendency to make me sleepy and grumpy. (I'd give a kingdom to find an over-the-counter drug that make me Happy and Doc.) They seemed to have their intended effect. The hives soon went down, and I considered the bullet dodged.

(The doctor I consulted this afternoon was quite grave in her assessment. Those hives around the throat may very well be, in extremis, exactly the allergic reaction that will close my esophagus the next time I'm stung. I am now, it appears, the kind of person who must travel at all times with an Epinephrine Pen, and avoid contact with wasps wherever possible. I, who have never been allergic to a goddamned thing -- including Poison Ivy -- am allergic to wasp-stings. Fu-huh-huh-huck me! I have a date with an allergist who might be able to discern more closely precisely what it is I'm allergic to, but I really hate the idea that my body has a weakness that could actually prove anaphylactically fatal.)

But the day was not over, my friends! No! There was more punishment in store!

Remember that Benadryl? Sleepy and Grumpy? I fell asleep in front of Jon Stewart, my feet propped on the table in front of me. A glass of grog sat next to my laptop, my foot poised (oh, you can see it coming!) just to the right of it.

A-yep. I awoke to a horrible electronic swooshing noise. The grog had sloshed, like the Waters of Babylon, into the keyboard of my MacBook G4.

It is now deader than Vaudeville.

My employers consider me an important enough person that even a day of mine spent without a computer costs them money (check this for something I very recently finished helping design -- a matter of some small professional pride, launched yesterday, after a year and a half of work) -- and so I was immediately furnished with a rather zippy new MacBook Pro, the Pentium Core Two model. But -- and that's a Big But -- the data on that destroyed hard drive is vulnerable. I don't know yet if I'm going to lose it. If I do, all of your email addresses, all my carefully collected bookmarks, all the phone numbers and names, the emails sent and received, will be gone. Not to mention my entire professional portfolio (although that can be reconstructed). I am in Existential Limbo -- all because of a fucking wasp-bite.

So let's sum up, shall we? Today...

1. I had a root canal operation.
2. I discovered I am allergic to wasp-bites, and that the next one might kill me.
3. I may well have destroyed a $2500 MacBook G4 that contained my entire fucking life.

And how was your day?