With new polls showing Beto O'Rourke and Ted Cruz in a virtual tie for the U. S. Senate seat from Texas, in utter desperation the Texas GOP sent out a tweet warning Texas voters that O'Rourke used to be...in a rock and roll band.
The horror!
Next thing you know, they'll be sending out tweets warning Texans that Democratic women wear pants, some of us actually use that newfangled Internet thingie, and that we, gulp, have sex for fun not just procreation.
Because, you know, the Democratic Party is where the wild things are.
They're in the jailhouse now, in the jailhouse now...
Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn pleads guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian agents.
Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort convicted on eight counts of felony fraud.
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen reaches a plea agreement on banking and tax fraud, as well as campaign finance.
Rep. Chris Collins (R-What else?), Trump's first congressional supporter is arrested on charges of insider trading.
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Who would have guessed?), another early Trump supporter, is indicted (with his wife) for spending $250,000 in campaign funds on themselves.
Want to guess what republican congressional candidates are circulating amongst themselves these days in an effort to gin up their base in preparation for November? A list of all the potential investigations the Democrats could open (over 100 of them) should they win the House in this year's midterm elections. The horror!
Newsflash for the aforementioned congressional candidates: It's called oversight, and it's not a campaign issue.
Though I stopped reading any of Donald Trump's tweets (yawn) or what he says in interviews (yawn again) a while back, I still see the headlines and read some of the reporting on whatever bullshit he's disseminating, and I usually have one of two reactions: 90% of the time it's anger, and the other 10% of the time it's utter bewilderment at the sheer scope of ignorance. Never once have I laughed--until this week.
Seems Trump was being interviewed and was asked to give himself a grade for his Presidency, and Trump answered A+. He further compounded the lunacy when he claimed that the stock market would crash if he was impeached based on what was inside his head--and everyone who knew air was responsible for the stock market tanking please raise your hand.... There's was something about the profound delusion displayed by Trump, a man who in a little less than two years has managed to stake a virtually unchallenged claim as the worst President in our history, that was truly funny.
Seriously, the whole spectacle was a bit like watching someone noticing there was a stink floating throughout the room and not realizing it was caused by their own fart.
Apparently the graphic posted above is one that Trump's supporters have been sending out in lieu of the convictions of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, and I have to admit that I like it very much. I really hope they do continue not caring!
Because the rest of us, well, we're going to keep right on caring about the rule of law and what it really means to be an American and not some common hoodlum. And we're going to take that caring right into November and take back the House and the Senate. And in two years, while they're still not busy caring, we're going to keep right on caring until we have all three branches of government and begin to once again do the work of the American people and not the pampered wealthy elite.
And then all you nitwits who supported the racist pervert can return to the land of Oblivion where you so rightfully belong.
It's easy to forget as we sift through all the filthy silt that is the Trump Administration, that every so often a small nugget of gold is found. And one of those gold nuggets these days is the permanent damage being done to organized religion, specifically the religious right and the Catholic Church, in lieu of their rabid support for a corrupt, racist, homophobic, misogynistic pervert, namely, Donald Trump, and for social issues which are becoming increasingly out of the mainstream
To wit:
Four Catholic priests campaigned for Donald Trump last month in Montana--throwing their support behind a man who lies unabashedly, has had numerous extramarital affairs, has broken the law, and has proven himself to be an abject racist. Apparently the golden rule doesn't apply in Montana...
The church once again has found itself mired in another in a long line of sexual abuse scandals, this time in Pennsylvania, where a grand jury found over three hundred priests who preyed on children. The grand jury also found evidence of a cover-up by both the local dioceses and the Vatican. Naturally, the staunchly conservative Catholic League jumped to the defense of the pervert parade. I've said it before and I'll say it again--what the fuck is it exactly with conservatives and defending pedophiles? It's reached the point where their moral standards are just sick.
Catholic Charities in Buffalo, NY, has decided that rather than comply with the state's laws barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, they are ending their adoption programs (based on their view of biblical bullshit). This has also happened through the years in Catholic Charities located in Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Illinois. Apparently, it's a matter of suffer the little children to come unto anyone other than the Catholic Church.
If the young people of today can see through the hypocrisy of the NRA, then most assuredly they will be able to see through the hypocrisy of organized religion. And the sooner it can be relegated to the fringes of our society where it belongs, the better.
Spending my formative years stuck in the small, but completely uninteresting town of Kokomo, IN, didn't lend itself to discovering much of what was happening in the late 70's in New York in the way of music. Still, I was lucky enough to enter the music business in the early eighties, and got caught up in a hurry--noting this week's tune on some now long forgotten compilation LP (located somewhere in the basement, I'm sure...), considered by some to be among the best that came out of the American punk movement.
Richard Hell was born Richard Meyers in Kentucky before moving to New York City in 1966. There he'd join up with his best friend from high school, Tom Miller (eventually Tom Verlaine), and form the Neon Boys, which became the band Television, one of the first punk bands to play regularly at the infamous club, CBGB's. Verlaine and Hell eventually went their separate ways over group control, and Hell would join up with New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders to form The Heartbreakers (not to be confused in any way shape or form with Tom Petty's back up band...)...in which Hell also did not last long as a member. Finally in 1976 he formed Richard Hell and the Voidoids, had an acclaimed record in 1977, had a heroin problem, released a second record in 1982 which went nowhere, and basically called it a career in the music business. Hell has stayed busy through the years writing a couple of novels as well as many non-fiction pieces, and performing one man shows. Other band members had a bit of success as well: guitarist Robert Quine would work with punk godfather Lou Reed on a number of his records in the 80's, and drummer Marc Bell went on to quite a bit of fame as one Marky Ramone, the only member of the Ramones to still be alive when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Fun Fact: Richard Meyers changed his last name to Hell because he said it described his condition...which is probably a bit better than changing his last name to Jesuschristwereallyliveinafuckedupworld...
Released on their now classic LP entitled, appropriately enough, Blank Generation, the single "Blank Generation" was not a huge seller (though it was considered an underground hit, for whatever that's worth) and did not chart, surprisingly enough for 1977 America, on the Billboard charts. It did, however, end up on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's list of the "...500 Songs That Shaped Rock."
Opening with a wicked in your face splash of guitar, "Blank Generation" continues apace for the next two minutes and forty-five seconds painting a somewhat nihilistic picture of life in America in the mid 1970's. Hell's vocals are an abrupt mixture of arrogance, anger, and ennui, echoing the sentiments of a, to quote a phrase, generation lost in space, and all the while the band's guitars are slashing, the drums are bashing, and Hell's bass guitar adds a nice flourish here and there. And lest I forget, the doo-wop influenced, yet oddly eerie "ooh--oohs" interspersed throughout the song are the piece de la resistance which make you know you are listening to a piece of pop music genius. While "Blank Generation" may not be the best punk song ever written (though it's certainly among them), it's certainly the one that best captured the spirit of the punk movement--and its influence on punk artists such as Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, and the Clash cannot be understated. It's another in a long line of performers who managed to make a little magic before fading into obscurity.
Lyric Sheet: "The nurse adjusted her garters as I breathed my first/ The doctor grabbed my throat and yelled, 'God's consolation prize!'..."
In hindsight, it's quite possible that what we saw in the 90's with the alternative revolution was the end of rock and roll as we know it. And while there will always be any number of bands and performers who continue the tradition, it's hard to imagine rock and roll ever again being the be all end all of popular music (for better or worse...). One thing is for certain, though--if Nirvana was the last of a breed, rock and roll went out with a bang and not a whimper.
It would be hard to underestimate just how influential Nirvana was in its rather short lifetime. They literally were the linchpin of a musical revolution--I worked selling music when their second album exploded and our alternative music section went from maybe six to eight rows of CDs to well over a hundred over the next couple of years. Though they were only together from 1987 to 1994 and only released three studio albums over the course of their short-lived career, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their initial year of eligibility (2014). Even more amazing (to me, anyway) is despite their small studio output, they've sold over 75 million records worldwide. Since their demise, bassist Krist Novoselic has gone on to become quite the political activist, and drummer Dave Grohl went on to quite a bit of success as the front man for the Foo Fighters. The elephant in the room of all of this, of course, is the death of Nirvana's leader, the man who didn't want to rule the world, Kurt Cobain, by his own hand with a shotgun blast to the head. It's easy to wonder what might have been, but in the end it's a lot harder to accept what was and that there are no guarantees that whatever output the band may have had had Cobain conquered his many demons, wouldn't have tarnished their legacy.
Released as the third single from Nevermind, their generation altering 1991 album, "Lithium" would reach #64 (with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100. While the song did not have quite the commercial success of their biggest hit, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," here in the U.S.A., it did hit number one in Finland--who knew there were so many cool kids in Finland?
The easy choice would obviously be "Smells Like Teen Spirit," but oddly enough it was "Lithium" that turned me into a Nirvana fan. My kid brother and I were on vacation in L.A. the weekend Cobain died and you couldn't turn on a music station without hearing all Nirvana, all day and all night, and my brother was convinced that Cobain had written the line, "I'm so horny, that's okay, my will is good" for the both of us because we were both single at the time and not having a whole heck of a lot of luck with women. While my brother was most assuredly wrong, it did get me to listening to the song and despite having questioned whether their work was for people much younger than I (I was all of thirty-five) became a big Nirvana fan. "Lithium" (supposedly the song is about a man who turns to religion after his girlfriend has died to keep himself from committing suicide) is really your prototypical Nirvana song, alternating between the soft and the hard, with excellent vocals from Cobain, and featuring perhaps more than most of their songs the talents of Novoselic (his bass playing is pretty much the backbone of the soft parts) and Grohl (his drumming is the driving force of the hard parts). Taken as a whole, I wouldn't be afraid to say it is perhaps Nirvana's best song, though I'm sure plenty of others would disagree. In the end, it's an existence questioning song from an existence questioning album, and as far as I know, the only song in history whose chorus is the word "Yeah" sung over and over (to excellent effect, I might add).
Lyric Sheet: "Light my candles, in a daze, 'cause I've found God..."
Every so often I come across political items of interest, send them to myself, and then delete them for lack of anything more interesting to say than has already been said--but it's dawned on me lately that even if my aging mind has nothing clever to add, it doesn't mean their cleverness shouldn't be shared:
A Canadian writer notes that he never thought he'd live long enough (he's 70) to see a time when Canadians would be "...wealthier, healthier, better educated, happier, and more secure than the average American..." but he has. The culprit? The republican dominated Supreme Court, which has declared open season on workers, and given their corporate overlords victory after victory. Thanks guys! And another reason to denounce the nomination of Brett Kavaugh, who will fit right into the corporately controlled Roberts court.
A tweet from Tay Zonday pretty much sums up being poor in America--poverty does indeed charge interest. And one hell of a lot of the interest is poor health--up to and including death. One of these days enough Americans will wake up and realize that the true tragedy of poverty is that it only begets even more poverty.
And speaking of poverty...the great Paul Krugman had a piece a short while ago in which he argues that Trump and republicans War on the Poor isn't a bug of their philosophy but a feature. And that it's driven by simple cruelty. Judging from what I've seen of Trump, republican politicians across the country, and many Trumpskis, I think his analysis is spot on.
While I usually think Dana Milbank is another in a long line of putz pundits who have absolutely no clue about the real world implications of republican policies, I do think he hit the nail on the head in this piece--republicans may have gotten what they wanted with their tax cuts and Supreme court nominees, but the backlash is likely to be ugly. You can only shortchange the will of the people for so long before they give you a big old boot to the head (aka, payback is a motherfucker...).
Repeat after me...if there is any one subject upon which pop music can pontificate with the poets, it's that of a broken heart. And this week we are featuring, beyond a doubt, bar none, and bet your bottom dollar the best song ever written on being the lover left out in the cold.
After an historic start (their debut album sold 13 million copies, and its follow-up, Vs., set a then record for most copies sold in its initial week), Pearl Jam has quietly continued to make music for the better part of 28 years, and continued the tradition of bands such as the Rolling Stones and The Who, on to REM and U2, who have had long careers and continuously gave their fans the best that music has to offer. There's a lot more to Pearl Jam's history than can be covered in a brief recap such as this, but four of the five original members are still with the band, with the fifth having been with the Pearl Jam for twenty years. Through that time they've released ten albums, won a couple of Grammy Awards, lost an epic battle with Ticketmaster over the pricing of their tickets, toured worldwide and been featured in just about every music festival at some point, and were eventually elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility in 2017. Pearl Jam has been something of an oddity, as the band as a whole has never been comfortable with its fame, and in fact, since its debut album, doesn't do much television, gives few interviews, and has completely refused, even when music videos were still an interesting vehicle, to do any more music videos. And while the band may not have had quite the success they had in its early years, it has nonetheless thrived. Kudos also to Pearl Jam for being strong supporters of a woman's right to choose (all five members are male, too), supporting numerous liberal causes, and helping the greatest President of my lifetime, Barack Obama, in both of his Presidential campaigns.
Released in 1991 on Ten, Pearl Jam's hella debut album, "Black" was never promoted as a single because the band refused to let the label release it as such, feeling the song was too personal in nature and that overplaying it would destroy the song's heart and soul. The song has, though, gone on to become a fan favorite, and in 2011 was voted the ninth best ballad of all time by the readers of Rolling Stone (for whatever that award is worth...).
Written by Eddie Vedder with music by guitarist Stone Gossard, "Black," Vedder has said, is a song about first relationships. Be that as it may, Vedder has written a song about a failed relationship that is succinct without being maudlin, using imagery such as clouds, broken glass, and children playing. Vedder's vocals convey anger and hurt and sorrow with each breath, while the band keeps the music low key, but rises when Vedder's anger or hurt or sorrow rises, and follows his emotions concordantly throughout. One of the things I noticed when listening to it this week in prep for this piece (other than how much I still really fucking love the song) is that there are very few rock and roll singers who can do as much with grunts such as ooh, ah, and uh as Eddie Vedder--it almost amazed me what can be done with a single syllable to capture a person's emotions. The song closes with some doot doot doos (the lyrics say they're too doo doos, but it doesn't sound like that to me) somewhat reminiscent of the Stones "Sympathy for the Devil" which only adds to the spinning and swirling in one's head and one's gut at the time one realizes that a love is lost forever. In the end, "Black" is a song not only about the bleakness today of a relationship's end, but also how it can also darken one's future in that life may well go on, but one's perception of it will never be the same.
Lyric Sheet: "I know someday you'll have a beautiful life/I know you'll be a star in somebody else's sky/But why, why, why can't it be, can't it be mine?"
Nothing like being a consumer in our current republican induced corporate dystopia...
I received an e-mail from Walgreens this week, in which I was invited to review their new Terms and Conditions of Use, which were supposedly "...ways to improve [their] products and services." Unsurprisingly, when you click on the link, the first order of business is to inform you that if you use Walgreens products and services, you must consent to binding arbitration should any disputes between customer and said corporation arise. For those not familiar, the difference between arbitration and going to court, is that in arbitration, consumers and workers are 2/3 more likely to lose, and if they do happen to win, collect 3/4 less money than if they sue through an attorney.
Now in and of itself, this isn't that unusual--as consumers we've probably signed or agreed to numerous such contracts. But what really struck me was this sentence in the letter (and I am quoting verbatim): "If you do not agree with the revised Terms and Conditions of Use, you can choose to stop using our products and services."
Admittedly, because their stores aren't very convenient and their prices are exorbitant, my family rarely shops at Walgreens. But still...what Walgreens is telling its customers, in effect, is that if Walgreens should, through its own errors, hurt, maim, or kill any member of your family, they really don't give a shit as long as their bottom line has been protected. They are essentially telling you to either do it their way, or fuck off.
Apparently, Walgreens isn't familiar with the fact that there are literally dozens of companies that offer most, it not all and more, of Walgreens products and services.
And if you haven't already guessed, the chances of me or my family ever shopping at Walgreens again is right at zero.
It's kind of surprising, in light of our primary elections here in Michigan this past Tuesday, that no pundits are noting that on the republican side, GOP voters soundly rejected our current Governor, Rick Snyder. Despite all his supporters claims of a Michigan comeback led by Snyder (dubious, at best), his hand picked successor, Brian Calley, barely topped 25% and fell woefully short of republican nominee and Trump sycophant Bill Schuette's 50%.
But when you poison thousands of children in a major city, hire companies that feed maggots to our prisoners, and raise taxes on the elderly to give tax cuts to corporations to create non-existent jobs, and your state's roads remain among the poorest in the nation, it probably isn't so surprising that your heir apparent fares so poorly amongst the electorate.
Here's hoping that in November's general election plenty more Michiganders see through the republican bullshit and send Schuette packing as well--Governor Gretchen (Whitmer) has a nice ring to it.
The Koch Brothers have spent nearly forty years building up the republican party to do their bidding, stoking racism, misogyny, and homophobia--whether they agreed with it or not--and handing out lots of checks with lots of zeroes to have their agenda enacted. Alas, stoking hatred and buying influence have a way of coming back to bite one in the ass, and the Kochs currently have a lion latched on to their fannies--in the form of one Donald Trump.
Seems the Kochs aren't too fond of anti-immigrant policies and certainly aren't too fond of anything that trumps (in a word) free trade--which Trump's tariffs are gouging into. But after voicing their concerns at a recent confab and vowing to fight back, Trump took to Twitter to rile up the base and suddenly the Kochs are not only personas non grata for Democrats, but for the republican rank and file, as well.
The Kochs should have seen this coming--in the immortal words of one Forrest Gump, "Stupid is as stupid does" and Trump as well as his supporters are neck deep in stupidity.
Still, it's nice to know that Schadenfreude feels as sweet as ever.
For some time now I have been wondering when some major entity in the media--The New York Times, The Washington Post, one of the three major networks nightly news anchors--was going to stand up and say, "Civility be damned--Donald Trump is not normal and we need to end this chickenshit circus immediately!" and when I read this piece from The New Yorker, I thought, "At last, someone finally gets it!" Alas, it turns out it was written in October of 1973 and concerned Richard Nixon, not Donald Trump--but the parallels are downright eerie.
It's worth noting that less than ten months after their editorial, Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace.
Let's hope our current national nightmare has the same richly deserved ending.
Another week, another song that I discovered via The Last Waltz...
Many moons ago I worked with a woman who may have been the biggest Bob Dylan fan I've ever known--she literally thought he walked on water. For whatever reason, she'd never seen The Last Waltz. Her boyfriend managed to get a copy and as she was leaving work to spend an exciting evening watching a concert film, all she could talk about was seeing Dylan perform with The Band. Before she left I warned her to be prepared--Van Morrison gave the performance of the film performing "Caravan", and Dylan (as every other performer on that night) paled in comparison. She looked at me skeptically as she left, but when she came to work the next day she took one look at me and said, "Boy, were you ever right." Morrison's performance that night is quite probably the best single song performance I've ever seen in all my years following pop music.
Van Morrison is another in a long line of artists featured here on FNJ whose career resume is just a tad long for a brief recap. Morrison's career started in 1958 in his native Northern Ireland and he played in a series of local bands until 1964 when he joined up with some fellow Northern Irishmen and formed Them. Few folks know that the oft covered garage rock favorite "Gloria" was written by Morrison and originally performed by Them. He went solo in 1968, had a hell of a run through the 70's, and though he hasn't had quite the commercial success since, has still remained an intriguing figure in the annals of rock and roll. Morrison has released 39 albums since 1968 (and five live albums), sold millions of records, is renowned for his live shows, won two Grammys, was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003 (with an introduction by none other than Ray Charles), and was knighted in 2016 (that's "Sir Van Morrison" to you, bub). Regular readers (both of you) know that I am a big fan of what is known as "Blue-Eyed Soul"--well, Van Morrison invented it (to this day, Morrison considers himself to be a soul singer). Though Morrison has done very well commercially, he isn't as big of a household name as some of his contemporaries, but virtually any list of the all time greats of rock and roll will have Morrison somewhere near the top--and deservedly so.
"Caravan" was released in 1970 on Morrison's influential (and my favorite album of his) LP Moondance.As the song was never a single, once again this week we have no shout outs for Billboard magazine. The album itself is Morrison's best-selling of his career, and was ranked at #65 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Fun Fact: The sha-la-las in the Counting Crows song "Mr. Jones" are a tribute to Van Morrison (specifically "Brown Eyed Girl")....
Morrison has said that "Caravan" was inspired by hearing the radio playing in one of his neighbor's homes night after night when he was living in Woodstock, NY. And what an inspiration--it's probably hard for young folks today listening to a song about the glory of music on the radio when in this day and age there are literally dozens of sources for hearing music. But once upon a time the radio was the only place to hear music, new and old, and one could hear Bob Dylan, the Supremes, the Beatles, and Marvin Gaye, in just that order (good luck finding a station like that today). From its tantalizing piano at the outset, to its horns, to the gypsy inspired lyrics, "Caravan" is a pop music marvel, carried home (as has often been the case in Morrison's songs) by the Celtic Soul of Morrison's vocals. Close your eyes and turn it up...so you know, it's got soul. Indeed.
Lyric Sheet: "Turn it up, turn it up, little bit higher, radio/Turn it up, that's enough, so you know it's got soul..."
Enjoy:
Enjoy, Part II--can't resist the version from The Last Waltz. Kick it with Van the Man and watch the joy on the faces of The Band:
The average American gets paid just enough so he doesn't quit his job, and works just hard enough so he doesn't get fired.
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." Source unknown
Uncle emaycee Wants You For the Coming Class War! Enlist today....
Capitalism: Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you can exploit his labor, become filthy rich, and keep the poor bastard living paycheck to paycheck for the rest of his life.
