RUFUS

Stax, Volt, and Enterprise, in their heyday, put out a consistent string of great records that we can all agree were great. They had an immediately recognizable sound. That is definitely Al Jackson on the drums! That's Steve Cropper playing that guitar! No doubt about it. They all worked well together, and they always sounded like they were having fun. 

Sometimes, though, the fun component was just off-the-chain. Sometimes, it sounds like the whole recording session was having a ball. This is one such record, in my humble and no doubt personal opinion. This session featured Rufus Thomas, who always brought the party, so maybe it's no surprise. Could that be the secret? 

I think that it's more likely that the secret to these wild jams is that they happened on records that were over in the corners of the labels' output. Not front and center like Otis Redding, or Booker T and the MGs. The pressure is off under those circumstances. I'll bet that records like this were cut fast in between larger studio projects. There's a great cut about Bar-B-Que that the liner notes say was cut on the fly, written and recorded while the band was waiting around for a "more important" session. That one sounds like a party, too. 

Disclaimer: I know that I come off like a know-it-all sometimes, and I don't like it anymore than my detractors do. Really, I only know what I like, and I like records that sound like everybody was having fun making them. It makes them more fun to listen to, don't you think? 

Cardi B Should Have Taken The Deal

The video is called, "Pay the two dollars!" The moral of the vid is that listening to a lawyer who is only trying to up his billing can get you in trouble. Many times it's best just to go with the easy way out and cut your losses. 

Cardi B illustrated this point nicely last week. The underlying facts took place in my home town, which surprised me somewhat. College Point, my sleepy little corner of New York City, the little town on the way to nowhere, has grown in importance sufficiently to have its own strip club. A place called the Angels. (I've never been to the club myself; it has been twenty years since I've been back to town at all.) 

Cardi B had a beef with two heavily tattooed bar-tenders (of the distaff persuasion), and late one evening Cardi and a few of her peeps charged the place and gave the girls grief. The ruckus was sufficient to interest NYPD cops from the nearby 109th Precinct. Cardi B and two peeps were arrested for misdemeanor assault. At her arraignment on the misdemeanor, Cardi B was offered a terrific deal by the Queens DA's office. Plead guilty to a lesser assault charge and walk away, no jail time, no community service, no nothing. It had actually happened, after all. 

This is where Cardi B should have "paid the two dollars." Unfortunately, she, like the poor man in the video, had a lawyer. In fact, she had two lawyers, high powered guys. They convinced her to plead not guilty. 

That led to more investigation by the DA's office. They uncovered some damning evidence very quickly, simply by checking the relevant social media accounts. They discovered that Cardi B and the other two defendants were batting this around on whatever chat sites the young people are using these days, planning the assault, and Cardi B had been offering payment to the actual assault team. That makes it a felony. Back in court to be arraigned on the new, more serious charges, Cardi B remained unimpressed. She plead not guilty again, and the DA's offer was, of course, no longer on the table. 

She'll be lucky to get out of this with probation after a guilty plea to a more serious misdemeanor. I'm sure that her lawyers are still telling her, "we'll fight this case to the last drop of your blood and the last dollar in your wallet." 

Them - Could You, Would You

The Atlantic Magazine Is Complaining About Baby Boomers

"The Boomers Ruined Everything," By Lyman Stone. It might have been a humor piece, but I don't think so. How many articles have we seen with that same title? He seems to have written the article in earnest, though, so I was moved to reply. If I see something like that on Yahoo! News, I let it go, but the Atlantic Magazine is a serious magazine that has been doing quality work for a long time now. They should know better. So here's my reply:

I shouldn't bother, because articles like this are just click-bait for millennials, but it has long since grown tiresome to have my generation blamed for all of the ills of the modern world, because, you know, post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Mr. Stone, who appears to be forty-something (from his photo on the IFS site), piles coincidence on coincidence while admitting that many of the trends that he mentions started when Baby Boomers were in grade school, or before we were born. Honestly? We are responsible for all modern drug overdoses, suicides, car accidents, and "violence?" Responsible for the increase in the number of jobs requiring licenses? Please. 

The vast majority of Baby Boomers, or member of any generation, have no more than the political power that God gave geese. I don't think it's fair to blame all of us for what the couple of hundredths of one percent of us may have done in one legislature or another, or on some corporate board. 

Young people now are in a terrible bind, it's true. Why not blame Nixon, who disconnected money from its traditional role as a device for measuring equivalence? Things had value for a reason up till then, and casting money adrift on the seas of "whatever people will pay" has led to a lot of mischief. Blame the fascist think-tanks that sprung up in the 1970s in response to those filthy hippies and those uppity blacks. (Sarcasm alert, if required.) Blame it on Reaganomics. How about the uncontrolled expansion of the money supply? The population growing to 330,000,000 people? Computers and the resulting explosion in productivity? The weaponization of medical billing and university tuition? Baby Boomers? We have been dust in the same wind that is pushing Mr. Stone down the same road. I, and most of my fellows, don't like what's happening now any more than he does. 

Signed, 

Fred Ceely

A grateful subscriber

Democrats Breaking Bad

It's time for the Democrats to screw the pooch again!

Trick question: how can you reliably beat the Democrats in a national election? Answer: release numerous polls showing them way ahead. Hillary was way ahead in the polls right up to the election, which she lost. The Dems saw those polls and shut down in safe mode. We got this! All we have to do is not make a mistake! Who needs to visit swing states? We got this! I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump people were planting the polls showing him losing to multiple Democrats. I'd be surprised if anyone told him about it, but it would be a great idea coming from his handlers. (What a job that must be! “Here's a cheeseburger Mr. President. Oh look! Fox and Friends is on!”)

We are also witnessing the repeat of the DNC struggle to lose by rejecting progressive candidates who would actually have a chance of winning in favor of middle-of-the-road centrist candidates. Hillary was a nightmare candidate, let's face it. She's a mediocre public speaker at best; she's awkward in any public setting; and no one liked her. I kind of liked her, but I had serious reservations. I was not in the least surprised that she lost. The war against Bernie Sanders is back in full swing, even worse, in full view. The Dems are somehow terrified of Elizabeth Warren as well, and I'm sure some of them would feint at the mention of Mayor Pete. They like Cory Booker, who is a wolf in sheep's clothing if ever there were one. They like Kirsten Gillebrand, the very definition of “plain vanilla.” And even though they've known him for forty years, they like Joe Biden! Go figure! Those last three are lose, lose, and lose.

But Biden beats Trump hands-down in all of the polls! Biden v. Trump is a Trump walk over out here in the real world. Polls, schmolls, Biden v. Trump and every single Trump fan comes out and votes while every voter under thirty-five years old stays home and takes a nap in between gig jobs.

How could the Dems win? I feel like I did every time some procrastinator came into my law office asking for help six months after the statute of limitations had run. Then it was, “if only you'd come to see me sooner.” Now it's, “if only you had taken the free advice that I offered you after the loss in 2016 (or at least the suggestions I made after the partial victory in 2018).”

If you think he's bad now, just wait and see how it goes after he wins next year. I hope that I'm wrong, but I think the odds are in his favor. If he gets a second term, it will be his favorite phrase all over again, “all options are on the table.” He's making all of the generals rich, and junior officers aren't going to do anything. Don't expect our police to be the ones to save democracy. Local politicians are very easy to arrest on Federal charges. The rich love him and when he makes his move they will cheerfully flood the TV with propaganda. Is that old fashioned? TV? Okay, they'll flood whatever is reaching people these days. Trump, whom we have deigned to consider a fool, could burn the entire playhouse down. American democracy has been slowly disappearing since the Patriot Act was signed anyway. Add the 2000 election, the lies and corruption of the Bush II years, the eight year assault on the democratic process when Obama was president (“the year of the eight Justices”), the Russians and Facebook and the voting machines and the FBI in 2016. All it needs now is one small push and American democracy is going right over the cliff.

You'd better get back to the TV, or Facebook. The lies are stacking up waiting for you. Handle with care! Whatever your politics are, remember your history: when it all goes wrong, everybody gets hurt. 

the aztex - i said move

Release date, May, 1967. Considering that and other fine points, how remarkable is this record? The garage sound was already widespread, with teenagers learning to play as they went, playing loud and going nuts with everything they were listening to. The fuzz-box was already all over the place. When did bands start to add snippets from spoken word sci-fi records? Was the spoken word Batman record fragment that opens this cut something new? 

That this and other records like it were the motivation behind the surf-punk revival in the 1990s can be said with confidence. Add massive reverb and you have Man or Astroman? 

I met a great friend of mine in L.A., in 1976. That was Norman. He was from Cleveland, and he had a very unique record collection. Many of us liked the German trance-rock/ free-rock bands, from Kraftwerk to Guru Guru, but Norman had copies of the Kraftwerk stuff in several languages. I already had friends who had one or two sound-effects records in their collections, I had a couple myself, but Norman had thirty or forty of the things. He also liked stereo demonstration records. He had a lot of movie soundtracks too, mostly sci-fi or horror, or anything by Ennio Morricone. He was the only guy that I knew who also had multiple spoken-word sci-fi records, actors reading stories from Amazing Science Fiction magazine or something, with sound effects. He was the first person that I ever knew who used these things in mix tapes as bumpers in between songs. Norman loved bands like the Aztex, so I'd bet that he had this record. I know that he loved the Sonics, and Davie Allen and the Arrows, in a similar vein. 

Tracing all of these innovations is not easy. I'll leave the hard work to real musicologists. 

A Near Death Experience Disguised As A Vacation

We had arrived at Peace Corps central in Thailand in early January, 2004. Eight weeks of training and it was off to our site. Christmas of that year brought us some slack time, and we decided to take a vacation. We had traveled around the country quite a bit by then, helping out with English camps and attending training seminars, and I had learned enough Thai to get by in simple situations. There was a big Christmas break at the schools that we were assigned to. Okay, three weeks of time on our hands, where should we go?

We had heard a lot about Ko Phi Phi, Phi Phi Island, out in the Andaman Sea not too far from Phuket. People raved about it, how beautiful it was, what a unique and amazing place, etc. Our teaching site was in the northern mountains; why not take a beach vacation in southern Thailand? We came this close to going (holds thumb and index finger very close together).

As we were considering it, we realized that it was high-season. Which is good, because it's the best weather of the year in Thailand, not as blazing hot as usual and no rain, but which is also bad, because everything is expensive and crowded. Prices are double or more in high season. We had received another offer in the meantime, an essentially free option. We decided to take that option instead. One of our fellow volunteers was staying at his site for the holidays, but he had a great invitation for Christmas dinner and his friends said that we were welcome to come along. We had more than a year to go on our Peace Corps hitch, so we figured there was plenty of time for the islands. Let's go for the merry Christmas!

The dinner was totally American style, and totally delicious. The hosts were a very nice couple, he a Texan in his early 70s, she Thai in her late 60s. She had lived in Texas for about twenty-five years, mostly with her first husband. When he died, she continued to attend their church, because that's where her friends were. That's where she met her second husband, a widower. When he retired, they moved back to her home province in Thailand. She had extensive experience with turkey dinners, complete in every detail. It's not easy finding turkeys in Thailand, and even harder is finding someone with an oven. She had both. There were ten or twelve of us altogether, and it was a great time.

On December 27, 2004, about to board the bus to return to our site, we heard about the tsunami that hit coastlines around the Andaman Sea on December 26^th. The underwater earthquake that generated the tsunami registered between 9.1 and 9.3 on the Richter Scale. That is one hellacious earthquake. Many countries were hit by the waves, as far away as Madagascar, and many people were killed. Even the early estimates of the dead and injured were shocking, and the numbers went up over time as more detailed reports came in. A few hundred were killed on little Phi Phi Island, including many vacationing foreigners. Something like 8,000 people died in Thailand alone. Thailand has a long west coast along the Andaman Sea, with many popular beach vacation spots. Total deaths for all affected countries were over 200,000.

All of that must have been terrible for the most affected parties, and the horror of it was not lost on us. I don't want to appear to be minimizing any of that suffering, whether of victims, survivors, or their families. It was also, however, a sobering experience for myself and my wife, now ex-wife. A casual, apparently meaningless decision to take the other fork in the road for that simple vacation would have put us into either the dead or the missing category. On Phi Phi, there is really nowhere to go, and on that day there was no warning. The odds are good that we would have become statistics.

Six or seven years later I visited Ko Phi Phi. I was in neighboring Phuket, also an island, teaching a class for two weeks, and one of my students was a big shot at one of the tour boat companies. He comp'd me. It really is a beautiful little island. Half of it rises straight out of the sea, exposed rock mostly covered in vegetation, to a height of about five hundred feet. There is no one and nothing but nature on that part of the island. Then there is a nice, curved section of beach behind a bay, with a touristy area of shops and guest houses that runs for a few hundred feet. and the remainder of the island is tall hills covered by inhospitable forested areas. Bays focus waves of all kinds, including tsunamis. (Surfers seek out bays because the waves are bigger.) It's a perfect tsunami trap.

This is probably the most abstract of my near-death experiences, but it is, nonetheless, one of the scariest of the bunch.