Go Gay Hippies!

This guy got on my bus 15 years ago who turned out to be this guy I hadn't seen in 20 years. In the meantime he had acquired a soon to be ex wife and a sweet terribly serious little boy. We made friends again and the little boy grew up. Along the way, the kid developed a taste for alcohol and weed and pain pills and lies. He ended up pissing everybody off so bad that he checked into rehab at the strong suggestion of his entire family. He finally decided that maybe that wasn't such a bad idea and he's been sober for almost a year and a half. Somewhere in there he picked up a guitar and became a pretty good player. He gets a big kick out of the fact that his dad's old friend is sober and we hang out together on our own now. He's been saying we should get together and learn a song sometime and today was the day and this was the song.

It was funny for me because he can play all kind of weird jazz chords and he knows all of this music theory and he can improvise in keys that only dogs can hear but he did not know how to play a country and western waltz. I got to get him up to speed on 3/4 time and led him through the chord changes chanting 1-2-3/ 1-2-3.

He suggested that maybe it would be cool to try playing the song to some kind of speeded up ska beat. He thought that would make the song sound funny and not so serious. I had to explain to him that the song is already funny. Apparently he hadn't considered that possibility. I sang it to him in my best super sincere country western voice and he had to admit that maybe it was a funny song after all. He played me a really funny song he wrote about having sex with farm animals.

The hardest part of "Pardon Me" is the spoken word part. You have to sound like you are just talking casually but pace yourself so you say the last word just as the guitar plays a G chord. We just barely got that going when it was time to leave.

I dropped him back at his house just before the Giants game started. He said, "I really wanna see the San Francisco Gay Hippies beat the Texas Oil Assholes." It didn't happen tonight but it's nice to know that every Giants victory is a victory for gay hippies everywhere. I keep thinking that it's my imagination that the World Series is about politics but the TV kept showing that notorious asshole and murderer George Bush. I was watching the game in a taqueria for a while. Somebody said "Bush really looks like shit." Somebody else said, "Good". To me he looked pretty hung over.

I had a pretty good day. Go Gay Hippies!

Then there's this

This is as lovely a Bay Area moment as I have ever seen and I don't even like Journey.

I'm a fair weather newbie fan, so fucking what?

Nobody here but us Giants fans. Good to know that San Franciscans are still all about "fuck you".

I haven't really followed professional baseball since the Mets won the 1969 world series. I am really enjoying this world series though. After hearing, for years, that San Franciscans aren't really Americans, from tourists for chrissakes, it is a real pleasure to see George Bush's baseball team beaten by San Francisco. I know this makes me not a real fan plus how dare I confuse sports with politics? All of that. I don't care. This is fun. Texas fans are scandalized by Giant fans smoking weed in the stands? Personally I think that gay Giants fans should scandalize them worse by kissing in the stands. As Soupy Sales once said, "I'll kiss you between the strikes and you can kiss me between the balls." Sadly the series is moving to Arlington. I'm sure Arlington has a really nice Walmart and I'll just bet they have a really good TGIFridays too. As the Talking Heads once said, "I wouldn't live there if you paid me." Go Giants.

Apropos of nothing whatsoever, I really like The Thermals first ep. They have some other good stuff but this is the one for me.

No Culture Icons- The Thermals (Buy)

Posted elsewhere

Originally posted at John Shirley's Facebook page.
A work friend very earnestly explained to me that his wife did not understand his desire to get together with other people who are "interested in exploring anthropomorphic animal costumes". I about shrieked, "Holy shit! Are you a furrie?"
He started looking all serious and said, "Why? Is that a problem for you?"
I think his wife should restrict his computer privileges. This is a man who has already admitted to me that he has built his life around ideas he learned from Star Trek.
Moody-ESG (buy)

Why I write

So the other day I'm watching this interview with some guy I've never heard of. He says, "Writing is for people who like to be by themselves but also feel this need to communicate." That sums it up. I don't write much and I don't write for noble, world changing reasons. Sometimes I need to tell somebody something

A Perfumed Garden- The Television Personalities (buy)

Detroit in the '70's

Like I've said, all my best stuff gets posted elsewhere. A few days ago a friend sent me an article about Detroit. It set off this long reminiscence about life when I was 19 or 20 years old.

"I moved there 37 years ago and huge areas of the city were already abandoned. I used to live in one of the semi abandoned mansions near Indian Village. 13 of us were renting a 10 bedroom house with servants quarters and horse stables for something like $150 a month. It was as insanely dangerous as the South Bronx or Alphabet City (Back then) but cheap to live, tree lined and you could get a two day a week student job in the car factories for union wages. If you were lucky one of your two days was Saturday so your pay started at time and a half. For a while there I was even living on my earnings working one day a week at Chrysler's Jefferson Avenue Assembly plant. It was the weirdest mixture of Industrial culture, apocalyptic urban collapse and '70's bohemianism.
Cheap rent, high wages but there were no grocery stores, drug stores or laundromats. You had to take a long bus ride to the suburbs to buy fresh vegetables or do your laundry and anything that wasn't left locked up with serious hard core locks would be missing when you got back. Everyone (except me and my friends) carried a gun and people got shot all the time. When I was living in a row house near downtown someone kicked in our back door while we were upstairs. We thought about going downstairs and then realized that who ever it was had heard us and they hadn't left. We figured he'd kill us if we went downstairs so we stood at the top of the stairs and cleared our throats until he left. (Ahem, ahem) There wasn't really anything to steal so he ended up loading a box with all of our groceries and stole the little radio that was our only source of music. Everything else had already been stolen earlier.
I find it amusing that some of the trendiest anarchist ideas being advocated by dreadlocked vegan trustafarians were originally developed by friends of mine in Detroit. They were mostly young autoworkers taking classes at the Harvard of the industrial proletariat, Wayne State University. I still sometimes hear from those guys and I don't think they're impressed with their followers.
A while ago I ran into one of my old radical roommates from those days, a (then) young Black guy who grew up in Harlem. Now he's a shop steward for the San Francisco City electrical inspectors. He's married to an old radical girl from back then. They own a house in an outer neighborhood in SF and talk about moving to the Sierras when they retire."

A little further reminiscing, My roommate Jim was a tall skinny hillbilly intellectual from some little town in upstate New York. He had a badass Mercury Cougar with alloy wheels and wide tires. He used to be a heroin addict. Then he was an auto worker. He said that factory work was like being a junkie. A year or two would go by and you couldn't remember anything but a couple of bad days and a couple of good days. All of the other days were the same. 

One morning we woke up and Jim's car was sitting in the alley without wheels or tires. The thieves had courteously left the car propped up on cinder blocks with a full tank of gas. We had already been robbed of our little radio and the house was so cold that turning on the furnace was more an act of defiance than a remedy for the cold. We gathered up our tiny collection of 8 tracks and went out to the car to get warm, listen to music and drink. We were having as much fun as we were capable of, even if we didn't know it. 

Below Your Means- Alice Cooper (buy)

He's In A Hurry (To Get Home To My Wife)

OK, So I decided not to post that song but I'm posting these two other heavies. This CD has a ton of great titles and a hell of a lot of great songs.

 Look, is anybody following my logic here? I don't listen to much "punk rock" and I  almost never post any "punk rock" songs here but I think most of what I post here is pretty much punk. Perhaps I am full of shit.

Then again, one of my favorite quotes is, "I used to think I was open minded but then I found out I just liked weird shit." Make of that what you will.

Pardon Me (I've Got Someone To Kill) - Johnny Paycheck (Buy)

It Won't Be Long (And I'll Be Hating You)- Johnny Paycheck (Buy) 

Paycheck was the most morbid hard core honky tonk guy on Earth. There's songs about nuclear destruction, songs about getting beat in bars, songs about cheating wives and songs about murder. It's the nuclear destruction thing that kind of pushes him over the top. I mean, most honky tonk songs are about self loathing and drama but you know...

I posting this in a hurry but I'd like to pause for clarification. No one has ever exactly defined hipster to my satisfaction but most people seem to agree that hipsters enjoy irony. I'm not a hipster. I like these songs.

World of Dispensation

Because life is not all silly songs. Sometimes life is beautiful songs. Around the time this came out I was suffering from some kind of brain fever. Too much liquor, guns, drugs, unhappy girls, poverty and small town life. I was turning into a grown up and life was not trending in a grownup direction. There were, however, these moments of unbelievable clarity. I didn't know what to do with them. The fever would break and I would be granted a moment of peace. Hearing this song was one of those moments.

World Of Dispensation- Singers And Players (Buy everything they ever recorded. Do it.)

Breakeroo! Still Keeping It To Once A Month.

I sent this song to Blogpal Devil Dick but I enjoyed it so much I had to share it with the whole darn blogosphere.
It seems obvious to me that the guy who recorded this is gay. Gay people often have much better and more subversive senses of humor than straight people. That makes the song sort of a double joke. I used to listen to it with my friend, Vern. Vern was a real cowboy, raised on a ranch training rodeo horses. Among other things he used to drive big rigs over the road. He was also gay.
We shared a deep and abiding love of beer and old country songs. When I played this one for him he laughed so hard he pissed himself. I'm sure the beer didn't help.
Last I heard from him, Vern was working for the CHP in Southern California. This goes out to him and all of the other gay rednecks on I-5

C.B Savage- Rod Hart (buy it if you can find it)

Update- Turns out the whole album is available to download at Amazon. Bread on the waters!

Oops, I missed a month

I haven't posted anything for the entire month of June. I've been real busy and pretty happy about it. A day or two a week I ride the bus to Oakland to work at the part time job. That's one of our buses pictured above. I've been enjoying the job, even though it is a job. I was just sworn in as a delegate to the North Bay Central Labor Council. I'm a retiree, but I'm still a union member and our local president asked me to take the job. It's nice to meet some real labor people and learn about some of the good work they're doing, right here in racist hippie liberalville. Hey, I love racist hippie liberalville but there's definitely room for improvement. I've been seeing my friends. I'm playing a little music. Went to the Jim D'ville ear training workshop. I'm going for lots of walks in beautiful California nature.
OK, so the world ain't right. It's definitely not right but at long last I'm approaching the problem from a good place.
So look, I just wanted to share this song. Danny Barnes is impossibly cool, too smart to be real, wholly dedicated to music and capable of transcending genres in the blink of an eye. This is some kind of banjo weirdo death chant.

Funtime- Danny Barnes (Buy)

Oh and thanks to Mike W. for putting me on to Mr. Barnes

Fuck yes, I'm from New Jersey

Every year my family would make our annual memorial day pilgrimage to "the shore" as we call it in New Jersey. My favorite shore city was definitely Asbury Park. We used to go to Palace amusements and ride the bumper cars. For a lot of reasons that I'm not going into, I got a picture of "Tillie", the smiling face on the side of the now destroyed Palace Amusements building, tattooed on my left arm. Yep there's Tillie, almost in my armpit. My left arm is almost all ink and there just wasn't any place to fit him in. I'd consider posting a picture but he's all nasty and puffy looking at the moment.

Thanks to Devil Dick for this swell song. DD is a great guy and a Jersey patriot.

I Like Jersey Best- The Phil Bernardi Band (Definitely no longer in print.)

Farm livin' is the life for me.

For those of you who are urban dwellers. City people often imagine that life in the country is quiet. Rural America is all about small, unmuffled gasoline engines. starting at sunrise.  Some guy has been running a bucketloader, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and so on for the last nine hours. He's supposed to be preparing the riding arena by scraping off the top few inches of loose soil and preparing the ground so that several tons of sand can be dumped on it. The arena is about 2,000 square feet. You'd think he would have hit water if not China by now. Actually, the arena looks about the same, except for the tire tracks from the bucket loader. All of this is taking place about five feet from the sheet metal walls of my home. I am grateful to report that the guy got here before sunrise and wanted to get started right away but my landlord wouldn't let him. What is wrong with people? I can't think of anything that I would want to do at five in the morning. I'm guessing that several large truckloads of sand will be dumped at my backdoor at five tomorrow morning. Then the bucketloader dude can spend nine more hours spreading the sand, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth etc.

Don't get me wrong, it's beautiful here, but I'm thinking I might want to return to the big city. I'm not making any plans or looking at any apartments. I'm just putting it out there. The last time I put something out there, I got a job. I think I'd prefer a small, quiet place of my own but I'm open to the possibility of roommates.

I notice that nobody, nobody at all, pays any attention to the songs I occasionally post. This is great stuff here. Listen up. Here's some of what I'm listening to lately.

Howsabout I try a "provocatively" titled song?

The Girls Are Naked- The Creation (Buy) 

Dock Boggs was one fuck of a punk rock guy.

Old Rub Alcohol Blues- Dock Boggs (Buy) 

Finally, this is simply the most badass white blues song ever recorded. Absolutely.

Release Me- Charlie Feathers ( This is seriously out of print. Buy it if you can find it.) 

Any chump with ears can listen to music. Have you been producin' any art lately? (Comrades Nazz and Todd, you've already posted your answer in the affirmative.) I've worked up an almost satisfactory version of "Crazy" as written by Willie Nelson and made famous by Patsy Cline. For some reason I've been enjoying playing Television Personalities songs. The down side of my amateur musical career is that I have not been making it to any Ukulele Club meetings which is a real shame. I did however receive a fan letter for this very blog from the head anarchist down at the Petalukes. She publishes an interesting blog, California Women, I'm looking forward to reading more of it. My lessons with Tippy Canoe are  on temporary hiatus as Tippy tours and I reintegrate myself in the workforce. However, thanks to the good works of the Petalukes, I will be attending a work shop by Jim D'Ville. I'm just working around to studying Jim's book on music theory and his ear training for ukulelians video.

Sometime soon I'm going to work up ukulele versions of "Nature Boy" by Nat King Cole (among many) and "My Andy Warhol Poster" by The Time.

Life is pretty good.