Thanks to PG & E, this is what millions of Californians are using for light these days
Millions of people in California are without power right now because PG & E, the company that has a monopoly on utility services in Northern and Central California, has shut off their power because PG & E is so incompetently run that they are afraid due to high winds and high heat that are affecting the weather in California right now that their equipment may set fires they will be financially liable for. And even though the "emergency" PG & E is claiming is of their own making, they're refusing to reimburse their customers for either travel (e.g., people who are hooked up to medical machines are going to have to go somewhere else or die) or the loss of food due to spoilage.
When there comes a day that the government starts taking over more and more of vital services (electricity, gas, phones, cable, garbage pick up) and overpaid CEO's and their minions are sent packing the way so many of us have been since the Great Recession, they can do us all a favor and quit their whining and just take a good look in the mirror.
Because eventually their greed is going to be the reason we the people start clamoring for the state to take over businesses which are a lot more concerned with their bottom line than actually providing the services they promise.
I discovered this week's tune back in the day when MTV was still just a music station--all video, all day long. Times may have changed, but not my enjoyment of this week's tune....
Much to my surprise (admittedly, I know very little about her--I actually thought she was from New York, not the U.K.), Joan Armatrading has put together a hell of a career. She started in the mid 60's in London doing impromptu shows and musical theater before getting her first contract and releasing her first album in 1972. Since that time she's released 19 studio albums, 17 of which charted in her native U.K. (four of them hit the top ten, with a compilation album also topping out at #9), three live albums, and five compilations. She hasn't had as much success here in America, but ten of her albums have charted with the best peaking at #28. Armatrading has also been nominated for three Grammy Awards and two Brit Awards. She released her latest album in 2018, and completed her latest tour in 2016. She is also known for supporting new and local talent--during her 2012 tour she had a local artist from each of the fifty-six cities she played open her shows.
Fun Fact: Armatrading left school at sixteen to help support her family, but was fired from her first job as a typist for bringing her guitar to work and playing it on her tea breaks. Man, what a shitty boss that must have been--I'd be thrilled to have one of my employees play a guitar at break time....
"I Love It When You Call Me Names" was released on Armatrading's album The Keyin 1983. The song was never released as a single, but has become a staple of her concerts. The album was not named for the key to life or the key to happiness, but rather for the house key Armatrading wore on a string around her neck so she wouldn't lose it. Oh, the things you'll learn here on FNJ!
Though Armatrading wrote "I Love It When You Call Me Names" about a man who enjoyed being physically and verbally abused by his wife, the song's inspiration actually came from two male members of her band who she noticed seemed to enjoy being insulted as much as insulting each other and Armatrading's finding this to be somewhat odd. The song's stanzas featuring nothing more than Armatrading's vocals over a literally pulsating bass and a driving drum beat, followed by the simple (just Armatrading repeating the title words) but catchy as all hell chorus replete with rumbling electric guitars. The song was somewhat of a departure for Armatrading, whose previous work was was mostly of a jazzy folk variety, but her venture into the world of power pop had one hell of an arrival. It was a different sort of song for a different sort of artist, with the lasting effect of being a hell of a fun tune...even thirty-six years down the road.
Lyric Sheet: "Big woman/And a short short man/And he loves it/When she beats his brains out..."
It was a little funny as I did my half-assed research for this week's tune, as it turned out to be a much bigger hit single here in America than I remembered from my managing of a music store at the time--though in retrospect, living in the classic rock bubble that was (is?) St. Louis, it probably wasn't so surprising that a pop single wasn't as big of a hit as it may have been elsewhere in the country. And I'm sure we still sold a copy or two....
The Dream Academy formed kinda sorta in the late 70's (1983 would be the year they officially became the Dream Academy) in London, England when Nick Laird-Clowes and Gilbert Gabriel went looking for a different sound than the power pop that ruled the day at the time in the U.K. Multi-instrumentalist Kate St. John would join a little while later and the trio was set. They released their first single and album in 1985, immediately had a hit single and album...and then pretty much faded into oblivion. The band would go on to release two more albums (neither of which had any commercial success), and a total of 12 singles, only three of which would chart either here in America or in their native U.K. The band parted in 1991, and did not reunite until 2014 (and again in 2016) for the obligatory Let's Make a Little Cash From Our One Hit Single Tour (nothing wrong with that--beats hell out of slinging groceries). They've only released two Hits packages, which is somewhat surprising considering the number of bands that can get eight to ten out of their one hit. All three members continue to play music for a living, and as far as I'm concerned, that's as good of a coda as any pop star can have.
Fun Fact: One of the instruments Kate St. John plays is the cor anglais, which until doing my half-assed research I had never heard of. It's also known as an English horn, and is somewhat akin to the oboe (which St. John, multi-instrumentalist that she is, also plays).
"Life in a Northern Town" was the first single the Dream Academy ever released on their quite appropriately named debut LP, The Dream Academy. It would go on to reach #7 (with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100 and #15 on their British charts. The album hit #20 here in the U.S. but only #58 in their native U.K. Somewhat of an oddity for an English band to have more success here in the U.S. of A. than in their home country.
"Life in a Northern Town" is a tribute to English folk artist Nick Drake, who died of an accidental drug overdose in 1974 (I'm not terribly familiar with his work, other than his song "Pink Moon" which will be featured on FNJ sometime in the future). Gabriel said the song was based on an event that occurred while he was in college (seems to me from the lyrics that Drake may have had a gig at said college and Gabriel wrote about what occurred), though the song has become somewhat of an anthem for, surprisingly enough, people who live in northern towns. The song is actually quite a tour de force, featuring elements of pop, rock, classical, and African tribal chants (the utterly delightful, if completely nonsensical, chorus). It has a definite anthemic quality to it (and not just for folks in northern towns)--you could definitely see this one as being one the audience sways to as they thrust their lit lighters into the air at a Dream Academy concert. The song has a couple of nice moments I'd never noticed until listening to it again over the past few days--at one point they mention the world freezing and as they do you can hear a chill wind blowing, and at another point as they're singing about the artist's appearance you can hear a crowd cheering. Anyhoo, it's another in a long line of wonderful reminders of how groups of people can come together and for a moment in time reach as close to perfection as most of us can get...at least in the realms of pop music.
Lyric Sheet: "He said in winter 1963/It felt like the world would freeze/With John F. Kennedy/And The Beatles..."
Man, how can they not be embarrassed by the sheer stupidity
A woman making bizarre comments at a recent town hall by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turned out to be--surprise, surprise--a republican plant.
The woman was discussing climate change and began to claim--and this, I shit you not--that we needed to start eating babies to save the planet.
The sheer stupidity here is fucking mind-boggling. Who in their right mind is going to believe that an unhinged woman claiming that we should eat children is going to gain any traction?
Well, other than republicans--and sure enough, idiot Donald Trump tweeted it out so his idiot base could froth at the mouth and make the rest of us want to puke.
Man, to call republicans worthless as shit would be an insult to shit.
Yesterday, Donald Trump stood on the White House lawn in front of the White House Press Corps and encouraged not just the Ukraine, but also China, to try and dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
THIS. IS. NOT. FUCKING. NORMAL.
I know it's hard sometimes not to just roll your eyes and think it's just Trump being the piece of shit he is, but for the sake of our nation, for the sake of our democracy, it is absolutely vital that we point out again and again just how abhorrent his behavior is...lest we set the table for his successors to do as they please as well.
Whether that be republican or Democrat, the decorum and dignity of the office demands nothing less.
It would have been easy for my Congressional Representative, Elissa Slotkin, who won her first election last November as a Democrat in a red district, to have remained on the sidelines as the revelations of Trump's traitorous quid pro quo with the Ukrainian President came to light. She could have proclaimed that she wasn't certain it rose to the level of impeachable offenses, and that the people of her district, MI-08, sent her to Washington to help solve their problems, and not get involved in political quibbling.
Instead, Rep. Slotkin saw Trump's actions for what they are: a direct threat to our Constitution, our rule of law, and our democracy and she boldly called for Trump's impeachment, despite the difficulty it will present when she runs for re-election next year, and despite the fact that it literally puts her political career in jeopardy.
Compare her political courage to that of republicans, who in light of all the evidence before them are either choosing to ignore or making excuses for Trump's actions with regard to the Ukraine, all in the name of saving their political asses.
When it comes to republicans, it seems their newfound strategy when the going gets tough in the Trump era is to tuck tail and run.
Doesn't bode too well for the future of our country, does it?
Another week, another song discovered by listening to Pandora's folk channel when I worked at the thrift shop....
I wrote about Mark Knopfler's song "Sultans of Swing" with Dire Straits way back when, so there's little need to rehash their history, though I can now add that they have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Knopfler has grown embarrassed through the years by the mega success of Dire Straits and was not present at the band's induction ceremony and has said it is very unlikely the band will ever reunite). Since his time with Dire Straits came to an end, Knopfler has kept busy with a solo career that now features ten studio albums, a few more soundtrack albums, a couple of collaborative affairs with Emmylou Harris, and some production efforts. While (much to Knopfler's relief, I'm sure) his solo career has not seen the frenzy that his stint with Dire Straits had, all but two of his albums have hit the top ten in his native U.K. (and the two that didn't were top 20), and he's had three of his solo efforts hit the top 20 of the Billboard 200 here in the States. And through it all, the man still plays one hell of a guitar...
"True Love Will Never Fade" was released in 2007 on Knopfler's album Kill to Get Crimson. It was released as a single in Europe without much commercial success, but was not released in the U.S. The album reached #9 on the U.K. charts and #26 here in America.
Fans of Friday Night Jukebox (both of you) know that I really enjoy listening to acoustic guitar, so they wouldn't be surprised that the first time I heard "True Love Will Never Fade" it took all of two seconds after hearing the opening acoustic guitar licks for me to make a beeline to the office computer at the thrift shop so I could find out who was behind this piece of music. I've actually put this write-up off for a bit because I wanted to make sure I did this song justice (which I probably won't, but what the hell, someday I'm bound to "fail better" as Samuel Beckett has suggested), because it's truly one of the best songs I've heard this century. Knopfler weaves the tale of an aging tattoo artist remembering a tattoo he put on a woman once (while I think the tattoo artist and the woman had a romance, I'm not entirely sure she isn't just a beautiful memory of one of his customers). The song has a poignant acceptance of the hands we are dealt in life, and reminded me of some of the excellent work Lou Reed, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen did in their later years, where the passion was just as rich as when they were younger, but much more measured. There's a quiet dignity to the portrait that Knopfler creates, and his understated vocals and the bands thoughtful playing makes for a mini masterpiece that truth be told, I enjoy more with each listen and is another reason I put off this post--so I could listen to it just a few more times.
Lyric Sheet: "These days I get to where I'm going/Make it there eventually/Follow the trail of breadcrumbs/To where I'm meant to be..."
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.
