Wednesday June 1st, 2005 @ 8:59 PM
Generation Blues
My father’s eyes twinkled as he staggered into the living room under the weight of our first television set. He was giving his four children a literal window to the world and never again would we be confined to the mundane monotony of Laramie, Wyoming. The busts of Mozart and Beethoven, which sat atop the piano, stared stoically at our new contraption as my father adjusted the rabbit ears.
We children sat cross-legged before this fantastic device, excitedly praying that our dad could perform some wizardry with the antenna and knobs. When the picture finally came clear my father could not have looked more shocked if a Giant Iguana had crawled out of the screen and started humping his leg. It was Little Richard, precariously pompadoured, prancing about in frilly, open-chested, sartorial outrage, and absolutely violating my father’s beloved eighty-eight keys with rock ‘n roll triplets. He shrieked blasphemous values about taking Long Tall Sally back into the alley while undulating in front of screaming white girls.
It was more than my father could take, let alone Mozart and Beethoven. His face was freeze-framed in electric-chair horror. While impaled by culture shock, his four children bounced on their haunches aglow in jack-o-lantern grins. None of us would ever again be satisfied by what we found in John Thompson’s piano book lessons.
My father thereafter banned us from anything Little Richard-a fight he couldn’t win because the opposing army had too many weapons. Elvis brought his pelvis, Jerry Lee stomped on the keyboard with his boots, James Brown could moonwalk an entire stage in seconds, and the Beatles and Rolling Stones were waiting in the wings to introduce long hair to a crew-cut culture.
But doesn’t every generation fight a losing battle with its children? For it is the tacit task of young people to challenge the tastes and values of their fathers, lest the status quo petrifies the growth and creativity of the human race. My father’s generation horrified their elders by jitterbugging in Zuit suits. My grandfather’s crowd danced the Charleston in Speakeasies. It goes way back because the pilgrim’s brought over Victorian virtues so severe that piano legs were wrapped in gaiters to avoid the possibility of arousal.
Today we’ve reached a strange chapter in America’s perpetual rebellion of youth. It is getting hard to find ways to alarm the last generation. The baby boomers blossomed into hippies who fornicated at festivals, ate LSD for breakfast, set fire to guitars, draft cards, flags, and bras, and used body odor as their cologne of choice. A musical hero might chase drugs with Southern Comfort and a dash of Tabasco sauce.
Music serves as the bellwether for rebellion. The lyricists of my generation had it easy because late fifties folk were listening to the Chipmunks singing ooh eee ooh aah aah, tang tang, walla walla bing bang, and Sheb Wooly had a number one hit with these famous words: it was a one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater…
But today’s youth has to really work at troubling the hippies and then the eighties rockers. Recently I heard this line in syncopated rhythm: beat the bitch with a rat… I wonder how that would sound in Chipmunk?
The gym is an amusing musical matrix. Young males get to play the music and they like it loud. One day after an hour of listening to the unintelligible screaming of a band called Dumpster Juice, I announced that it was only fair if someone representing us older folk could play some music, and to my surprise they agreed without me having to confront some musclehead with his pants hanging down beneath his underwear and his hair spiked stiff enough to aerate my lawn.
My music was on trial. I got out The Best of James Brown. After a couple of songs the boys were nodding approval. “Nice Screaming,” they said. Until then I had never realized just how much screaming James did. I guess old or young we aren’t that far apart, about two octaves I’d guess.
Posted by Carl
Monday October 21st, 2002 @ 8:54 PM
“The days come and go and they say nothing, and if you do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
I memorized that quotation many years ago and have used it countless times and in a great variety of ways ever since, probably in a past TTW, but seldom do I fully appreciate or use the gifts of any given day.
We Americans are a spoiled lot by anybody’s standard. We have come to expect our days to be full of material gifts and we whine over the most trivial of disappointments. That we have a program on television like the Anna Nicole Smith show tells me that our values are reaching a disgusting nadir.
Our children demand expensive electronic games and gadgets and profess to be unable to function in life without them. They have become skilled in laying guilt trips on parents who equate love with material purchases: “Joey’s parents bought him a techno marvel-surround sound-wrap around vision-three dimensional-cyber cloning-virtual reality-warp speed-Satan worshipping-hip hop playing-million gigabyte-video game with its own refrigerator and heat sensing back scratcher, plus–it that will guide him through puberty and do his homework all at the same time whether he’s awake or asleep. Our children’s bedrooms are a snake-pit of extension cords.
I was born the year after World War II ended. The first of the baby boom years. I went to grade school before anyone had a television. I was forced to get my entertainment by playing in the back yard or the City Park and using my imagination. In the winter I actually read books. The library was a place of great joy to me. I don’t want to sound self-righteous. If I had the techno-gadgets available today when I was a boy, I’d have become addicted just as fast. But I fear we are collectively becoming desensitized to the most beautiful gifts life has to offer.
I make my living, meager as it is, performing as a blues music artist. The entertainers at the very top of my chosen genre of music sell only a few thousand records a year with the exception of BB King and one or two others. The hallmark of our music is the ability to be genuine. To instill heart and soul into each note. To allow the listener to feel the emotion and character of the artist. Most music charts revealing top sellers and influential music don’t even list blues music. Record stores allot only a tiny shelf space to blues, some none at all.
The rage these days is techno music where machines synthesize sound and computers measure every beat and note to precision–the antithesis of blues where phrasing and heart play hugely important roles in the end product. It is hard to get a young person today to submit to the discipline of mastering a real instrument. They want thousands of dollars worth of techno turntables and synthesizers and computer cards.
To accompany this synthetic sound are lyrics often obscene, Satanic, murderous, sexist, and certainly vulgar. The other day I drove by a blues club where we play and it was half full at best while just around the corner was a theater where a hip-hop band was playing and it was noisy and overflowing with many young people waiting on the sidewalk hoping for a chance to get in. I have seen this all over the country. Last March in Salt Lake City people were standing outside around the block in freezing temperatures waiting to hear an advertised Satanic cult band while we played to thirty people at a blues club right across the alley.
I read a book one time that said it wasn’t good for the human soul to be surrounded with plastic flowers and fake bricks and zircon jewelry. I believe that principle holds true across the board. Try reading the label on some of the foods you eat, it reads like a chemistry formula. No wonder we have a nation of cancer and clogged arteries. This cancer I’m afraid has invaded our souls.
I could go on to moralize or write a diatribe, but why? Mankind is playing out a Saga in a scope far beyond the call of my tiny voice. What I can do is be thankful and recognize and use the gifts each day brings to me. It is so easy to do just the opposite: to lament my lack of success, to complain about how hard it is to obtain meaningful gigs anymore, to wish that I had a nicer house, a better car, a measure of status in my society.
Blinddog Smokin’ just returned from a little tour of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Over the long miles I was able to read deeply into several wonderful books with the luxury of nothing else to do. I’d look up into splendid sunrises and sunsets, majestic mountainscapes, passive farm scenes, and billowing Old Testament clouds with their intermittent rays of sun spearing through to the Autumnal earth. I smelled rain on the freshly harvested dirt of Eastern Kansas, and smelled it in another way in the thick forests of Western and Central Arkansas where frogs sang in mighty choruses in the gloam of a stormy twilight.
On the way home we drove all night through the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona where we told stories and laughed until we couldn’t catch our breath. We had spent three days at the King Biscuit Blues Festival along the Mississippi River where a Fall moon rose up out of the swamp trees and crossed the sky over tens of thousands of people sitting on the levy listening to the heartfelt music of the best the Delta land has to offer. We had gone down to the gospel stage and “got the ghost” among hand waving black folk who smiled at us in love and welcome.
Most of all, we had experienced the love and appreciation of our fans. In Cherryvale, Kansas, our greeting included a huge spread of home grilled steaks with all the trimmings. We slept on the floor of a bail bondsman’s office complex and awoke to a hot breakfast he cooked in his kitchen and sent on our way with baskets of fresh fruit and muffins and leftovers. Our memories include standing ovations and warm hugs and handshakes, tears in the eyes of fans who wouldn’t see us for another year, and the sincerest of smiles by those truly glad to see us again.
In McPherson, Kansas, we played to a full house on a Sunday night where people knew they had to get up the next morning to go to work. Again the club owner met us with a feast before we played. We stayed in this little town three days and slept in their houses and ate their food and drove their cars and even got invited to the Movie Theater for free. My hostess took me to her sister’s house to learn how to make pottery and gave me all I could pack into our limited space in the van to take home with me. Her husband painstakingly wrapped every piece so it wouldn’t break. Another lady sent us on our way, each with his own loaf of banana bread. Another spent days creating a collage on canvas of our images as she had seen them over the years in Kansas.
In Oklahoma City Miss Blues got up at 3 A.M., to prepare all day a feast for us before we played that evening. Barbecued beef ribs, roast, beef brisket, three kinds of corn bread, fruit salad, regular salad, sweet potato pie baked with honey instead of sugar. What a blessed soul she is.
When I lament not having much in life compared to my neighbors who drive fancy cars and take vacations to exotic tourist towns, I stop and remember Emerson’s quote and realize I am a man most blessed. I have a loving and devoted wife, four gorgeous kids grown up to be healthy and prosperous adults, two fun and loving step children, my first grandson with another due in December. I still have my parents and my siblings, and I have you fine people who like to read my writings, and many of you let me know that to my deep gratification.
Each day allows me the time to read and write, to engage in fun and creative endeavors, to make music, and to love my fellow man who is in such desperate need of loving in this world of terror and uncertainty. I maintain tremendous good health for a man my age and every day bringing me that gift is a day to be savored.
Blinddog Smokin’ has two fans, one in Chicago, another in Nebraska, who are dying of cancer. A relatively short time ago they both took their health for granted and had plans for old age with their loving mates. Now it appears neither will see that time come to pass. It touches me profoundly to report that both of these human beings wanted a Blinddog Smokin’ song to be played at their funeral, but I suggested that we really don’t have anything fitting.
I played softball for years in Chicago with the one man. We were in our twenties and I remember him so vibrant and energetic and agile. His wife tells me that there were many things they planned to do and put off for another day. They will never get to do those things together; the gift was carried silently away.
The Nebraska fan approached me only this last summer, not knowing anything about his cancer at that time. He and his devoted wife took me aside and gave me a package. It was a beautiful and very expensive sixteen hole chromatic harmonica. It took my breath away. I can’t afford such an instrument. I don’t think they really could either. But there it was with a message of thanks attached for the many hours of enjoyment I had given them in music and in this Tales Told Well column. He named me “The Blues teacher.” I was overcome with surprise and deep gratitude. This was from a man I seldom even saw in our audiences. I had no clue to how grateful this man was for whatever transcendence Blinddog had provided him over the years.
On a business and political level, America doesn’t reward its musicians. We lead a meager and sometimes desperate life with hope as our beacon. But on the grass roots level, America loves its musicians and gives to them a poignant heartfelt appreciation that brings tears to my eyes.
I watch our performances on those special nights when people who know and love us come to let us take them somewhere over the rainbow. It is our job to lift these farmers, mechanics, teachers, businessmen, housewives, truck drivers, etc., above the mundane to a plane of human potential that only the dynamics of inspired music can transcend. They realize whether consciously or subconsciously that they aren’t animals, or machines, or numbers, or anything relegated to anonymity or insignificance. They are human beings with the unique powers of emotion and love, full of wonder and mystery, able to exhilarate and remember. Those days are so special because we are your gift and you are ours. This is my way of not letting you slip silently away, because none of us knows how many days we get on this earth.
Carl
*Blinddog Smokin’ now has a manager, Ronald Chew, an attorney on Wilshire Blvd in the L.A./Hollywood area. He is a very nice man with a big perspective and scope of our potential. He doesn’t think small. He has recently gotten us a headline gig at BB Kings club at the Universal Studios in Hollywood.
*Blinddog Smokin’ will be featured on the cover of Southland Blues Magazine in December. This is the leading Blues publication for Los Angeles and San Diego and should open doors for us. The publisher has become a friend of mine and is very supportive of the band. He is a sincere and hardworking man whose humble and honest demeanor goes contrary to the Hollywood image and gives hope to those of us who want talent and character to win in the end over hyperbole and Machiavellian politics.
*Look for all new Blinddog Smokin’ promotional material to be out soon. We have invested in a top graphic artist, David Vaughan, who loves the band and works as a labor of love as well as money. This will be the most professional and artistic image we have ever portrayed and hopefully will mark the beginning of a new level in our opportunities.
*Jason “12 Fingers” Coomes has had a new custom guitar designed and built by Scott Platz and it will be the subject of its own Tales Told Well if Jason allows me to write about it. It is a mysterious guitar with a lot of mojo inherent in it for certain reasons and it is destined to be the stuff of which legends are made. I doubt you will receive the story of this guitar with indifference. You will love it, hate it, be fascinated or repulsed, but you won’t be indifferent. Jason will be receiving it sometime in the next month.
*Our congratulations to the King Biscuit Blues Festival volunteers in the little Riverboat town of Helena, Arkansas, once again you have made your festival an experience to remember, the best there is. Readers of TTW would do well to consider this experience in years to come. Some things exceed anticipation. Don’t go if you prefer plastic flowers to the real thing. This festival is what the blues is all about.
Posted by Carl
Saturday March 30th, 2002 @ 8:54 PM
I looked out at the audience and a cow looked back at me and mooed. We were setting up on a flat bed truck in the heat of a summer afternoon and the cow was the most attractive female I’d seen since I arrived. It was an Angus with long fluttering eyelashes. Her tale teased coyly as she swatted the flies around her bottom. Leaning on the fence all around this unabashed bovine lovely were about a hundred humans, smoking and spitting tobacco, and encouraging the cow as she chewed cud from a forkful of hay they’d spread around the lot.
In counterpoint to her sonorous moos, the crowd hooted and hollered profanely while they beckoned her to come hither and yon. The cow just stood there until rocks began to pelt her backside. She moved away. An empty Budweiser can hit her between the eyes; she whirled and trotted away. The humans roared with varied intensity depending on where she ended up each time she moved. A man belched mightily and several women around the fence laughed hyena style.
I noticed the ground inside the fence was chalk-lined into many squares. The squares had numbers in them. After about a half-hour of taunting the cow, a man yelled out, “She ain’t a gonna do it, let’s get the chicken.” Soon a fat, frightened, chicken was tossed onto the squares. Unlike the cow, the chicken was lively and ran all about. The crowd pelted the chicken with pebbles and cigarette butts. Everyone laughed and encouraged the chicken. They had forgotten about the cow that now stood still, probably wondering how she had gotten into such a predicament.
Suddenly the Chicken slowed and arched her back a moment and then defecated quickly onto number 37 sending a big bearded guy into a paroxysm of knee slapping and bellowing. The Chicken had done what the cow couldn’t do; she had ended the contest. “You purty thing,” the man cried, “You done shit in my square…” If I remember right, he won about three hundred dollars, and the chicken.
Dark clouds were piling up over the Rocky Mountains to the West and they shimmered with electricity. The happy winner had the chicken under his arm and was showing her to his buddies, bragging about her shitting prowess on his way to be a judge in the women’s flatulence contest. Five, big, burrito-biting, bitches and a microphone-need I say more?
I felt bad for mankind. The only creature with the powers of reasoning, humor, love, compassion, creation and emotion was using these awesome potentialities for scatological fun and games. I became sad when I pondered this event and day being the highlight of the year for many of these people. They had held meetings, made plans, raised funds, and labored over its success. I thought about the enthusiasm they must have shown when they voted to have the great shit-in-the-squares lottery.
We started the music and people came from inside the bar and all around the games area where they had been crunching beer cans into their foreheads, catching a greased pig, and flinging cow turds for prizes. They had a kissing booth with a woman who looked like Howard Cosell smoking a cigar. People paid to watch drunken volunteers kiss her on the lips. Having no dance area, people danced where they wished and between the folding chairs in front of us. The dancing reminded me of the bouncing that toddlers do when they have to pee.
To the west the storm clouds had spilled over the mountains and were spreading across the horizon, close enough now for me to spot miniature zigzags darting out of them. A low rumbling threatened from within the black interior. The sun’s descent met the billowing whorls below and suddenly glowed brilliant red, the atmosphere magnifying its size and intensity. The moving sky became a harbinger of the apocalypse. I expected to see the demons from the Lost Ark movie shooting out of the swirling clouds. No one paid attention to the weather, the collective mentality wallowing in alcoholic stupor.
The late afternoon became very dark although turquoise skies remained in the east, lightening streaked repeatedly and pervasively in the approaching clouds followed by fantastic claps of thunder. Often many streaks of lightning would criss-cross against the black backdrop and thunder would arrive from all over in surround sound. The cow mooed nervously and a flea-bitten dog barked then hid under a pick-up truck. We started playing “The House of the Rising Sun.” Raindrops began to puff the dirt and I could smell the rain in the dust.
The fresh rain produced a lot of odors: gasoline from a spill just ahead of our flatbed, wet hay from the pile brought for the cow, freshly cut grass from across the street, the red end of a cigar absorbing the moisture, the coat of a mangy dog, rubber from an electrical short, hot summer asphalt soaking up wetness, rain pelted barbecue briquettes, and sage brought in on the wind from the prairie beyond.
When Jason went into that great solo you all know him for in this particular song, the heavens let loose their fury. The sky had become so dark that the stagehand had turned on the floodlights producing a spectacular water dance of blue, red, yellow, and purple. The thunder no longer followed the lightning, but now accompanied the jagged displays in mighty crashes one after another and simultaneously as well.
Jason Coomes lives to solo. Everything else in life is waiting. This is his purpose on earth and he treasures the moment with the passion of parting lovers. To say he is in a zone is to make tawdry the complete isolation of which he is capable. His focus transcends concentration into a spiritual centering that at this particular time had me impaled in wonderment.
Rather than flee the storm he strode out to become part of it. He lifted his guitar away from his body and to the turbulence above. He played with a fury matched only by the galvanization of the atmosphere. He didn’t curse the gods for their rage, he joined them. He saw the powers of the universe as a mighty orchestra come to elevate his solo in omnipotent power and ineffable beauty.
The wind tore through his long yellow hair and it flew like a battalion banner in the charge. Lighting burst about us illuminating the sky like titanic strobe lights, and wrote its own crackling, tearing, sub-melody to Jason’s solo. The tubes of his two puissant amplifiers glowed orange as he wrenched the volume level to compete with the elements. Chuck sat transfixed by the spectacle ahead of him, knowing that to stop and break the spell would be sacrilegious, a violation of everything Jason held holy and sacrosanct. Andy was stoic. Somehow nothing mattered but the transcendence. Equipment could be replaced, but never the moment, never the memory, never that rare glimpse of paradise.
I’ll never forget colors from the flood lights dancing fiendishly in the blurring rain against the alternating black and brilliance of the coruscating heavens with Jason in their midst, giving his very soul to the elements and the powers beyond-playing the solo of the gods.
The solo ended. We stopped. I looked out at the audience. No one was there. Of course they had retreated inside to safety and security, to cigarettes and beer, to inane jokes and meaningless laughter. They had missed it. A singular occurrence as rare as a magic unicorn, as precious to human potential as the first breath of a newborn.
I have seen many bands in my lifetime play outside and encounter the elements. Invariably they retreat to break time and a little smoke or booze. I may go the rest of my life and not see an orchestra like Jason and the gods. It was a thing to behold. It restored my faith in the potential of mankind. It was an escape to utopia, Valhalla, the Elysian Fields. It’s what separates we humans from the cow and the chicken-and the gulf is wide.
Carl
Posted by Carl