Baby's On Fire (Live At The Rainbow Theatre / 1974)

This album was like a wake-up call to the music world. The 1960s were a time of great change in many fields of music, free jazz, new classical music, new forms arising in pop and rock, great advances in electronics and recording equipment, and by the early 1970s, the possibilities for everything had been wildly expanded. This LP illustrated this new freedom to non-musicologists like me. 

Heartbreak Hotel (Live At The Rainbow Theatre / 1974)

Happy June 1st, everybody! 

Blondie - Heroes (David Bowie) 1980

This is a respectable cover, including an appearance by Robert Fripp, if the comments are to be believed. The real star, as usual, is Ms. Harry, shown here in an extensive collection of very nice photographs. 

I would tell you how much Debbie looked like my first wife, whom I had already been with for ten years, but you'd think I was just showing off. 

The Unlocked Door

So many questions are left unanswered in life. So many are unanswerable! People's hopes and dreams are often unattainable. Many people have no hopes or dreams! It doesn't matter much, in the sweet by and by. Almost everybody is disappointed in the end.

There is, however, one hope that can immediately be brought to fruition. One dream that is never denied. One wish that will always be granted, every time. When the day comes, when you understand completely and clearly that you cannot do this even one more time, you cannot wake up again and try to go through the motions even one more day, or perhaps not even for one more hour, when your only wish is for it all to be over, that wish is within your own power to grant. Your wish to be quit of all of life's hassles, embarrassments, disappointments, humiliations, and pains, will be granted. Your dream to be free of it all will come true. And for once, there will be no strings attached. It's not like the story “The Monkey's Paw,” by W.W. Jacobs, where there are terrible penalties for interfering with fate. You will simply cease to exist. You will return to the great nothingness that is the common ground shared by all future and past tense human beings. Present tense humans have the power to end it all any time they wish. Their verb changes to “was.”

It concerns me that I seem to think about suicide more than most people. Or, who knows, maybe thinking about it is more widespread than I imagine, and the difference is that most people don't talk about it as much as I do. In either case, I have come to think of suicidal ideation as a control technique. That, and a safety valve. In a world where the individual of limited resources is tossed violently on the heavy seas of human society, it comforts me to know that if the time comes when I can no longer stand it, I won't have to. According to the fire codes of life, the exit doors are always left unlocked. We are all free to exit any time we choose to do so.

Please note that I am not recommending suicide. Not for any individual, and certainly not for everybody. For most people, the natural order of things will deliver them into the comforting arms of death soon enough. Our time on earth is short, and it passes quickly. This is one of the few kindnesses that fate shows us. I, for one, am grateful.

Also note that I have no immediate plans to end my life. Nor, however, am I just fooling around. Somewhere in between, let's say. There may be someone close to you that is sending out signals that frighten you. If that is the case, here is a tip: people who really want to kill themselves rarely talk about it. They just do it. People who talk about suicide may be knocking the idea around like I do, reassuring themselves that there will be a way out if push comes to shove. Or they may be playing with your emotions. That is unfortunately a popular thing to do.

“Attempted suicides” often fall into the same category as confessions of intent. They're just messing with you. It's not like killing yourself was difficult. Quite the opposite, it's very easy. There are plastic bags everywhere, and any one of them will do the job just fine. Dry cleaning bags. You can drown yourself in a toilet bowl if you're serious about it. Any domicile is full of things that will serve perfectly well to hang yourself. Guns, of course, are a no-brainer (pun intended).

One sure sign that someone is just playing with your emotions is when they wonder out loud about the “best” way to kill yourself. Then they find something to worry about with every method. They wonder if it hurts to asphyxiate yourself with a plastic bag, and how long it hurts, or even how long is it uncomfortable. How long does it take to drown? Does it hurt? If they are worried about their own comfort in the act of self-destruction, they are not being serious. You can feel free to ignore them. In fact, go ahead and make fun of them.

I have obviously thought about all of this, so I should include a few cautionary tales.

Pills! Pills seem like such an easy way out. Tell a sympathetic doctor that your back is killing you, maybe do a bit of doctor-shopping, and get a script for Oxy, or Percocets, or something. Save them up, wash a bunch of them down with vodka, and voila! That sounds like the easy way out for a lot of people. You do need to be careful, though. Remember what happened to Lupe Valez. Excuse me, nobody remembers what happened to Lupe Velez. She was a movie star in the way-back, and when her star dimmed she decided to kill herself with pills. Her mistake was first consuming a meal of her favorite stuff, chili. Followed by pills and whiskey. When she began to vomit, she made her way to the bathroom, where she ended up drowning in the toilet bowl. Not a glamorous way to be discovered after the fact. I'm sure that she had spread flower petals on the couch to leave a more beautiful tableau for the cops. You also run the risk with pills of not taking enough, or getting the mix wrong. Many attempted pill-suicides wake up in the hospital with brain damage, a tube down their throats, and a huge hospital bill.

Shooting your own head off is a popular way to go, but there's an important trick to it. Don't shoot yourself in the temple! We see that so often in movies, or even cartoons. If you shoot yourself in the temple, you're liable to miss your brain all together. In one side and out the other, and the only thing that you lose is your eyesight and part of your sinuses that you didn't need anyway. Again, you wake up in the hospital with bandages around your head, fully aware of your situation, with somebody reading you the bill. At least this way you can hang around in bars and tell the fascinating story of how you lost your eyesight. Maybe people will buy you drinks.

Jumping from a high spot appeals to some people's sense of drama. Done properly, it does work. Here too, however, great care must be taken. I read one time in the Long Beach, California newspaper about a guy who decided to end it all by jumping. He made his way to the roof of a twenty-three story residential building, condos, apartments, I'm not sure. But twenty-three stories. That's well over two hundred feet, so it was plenty tall enough. I was working right down the road at the time, and both buildings were on the ocean side of the street. You want to pick your landing spot carefully in these situations, and check for windage. This poor guy omitted those steps. He jumped, and somewhere in the first two hundred feet the wind caught him and threw him into a big tree. He made his way painfully through the tree before it threw him out the other side, where after a brief sail through the air he landed on the awning of the building. Sturdy thing too, and springy. He bounced off onto the grass. He was scratched to hell from the tree, and he broke a few bones, but he was as alive as you or me. Disappointed? Embarrassed? Relieved? Pissed off? Probably some combination of those things.

Drowning in freezing cold water is total must to avoid. Over the course of my long life I have often read stories about people who had apparently drowned in frozen lakes after falling through the ice. I say apparently, because apparently when the body drowns in freezing cold water it goes into some kind of hibernation instead of dying right off. People drown in frozen lakes all the time, but it only makes the papers if some fireman revives them after they've been in the water for ten or twenty minutes. Think what you will, but that sounds like the plot for a horror movie to me. I'd rather be hit by lightning, and from what I've heard, that's no party.

The car in the garage; the head in the oven; the high speed crash into a bridge abutment; the cutting of the wrists; the pajama clad walk into the snow storm; there are a million ways to go. In a bed, of old age, no matter how sick you may be, is probably as good as any of them. Your conscience will be clear that way. I don't believe in any kind of judgment, but a clear conscience couldn't hurt. Who knows?

It's up to you.

Big Brother's Swan Song

(If this has been taken down, note that it is the cut, "Catch Me Daddy," from the CD "Live at Winterland, April 1968," by Big Brother and the Holding Company.)

This fantastic CD is a story that is very happy and terribly sad all at the same time. After a couple of years as a spongy jam band for stoned, uncritical dancers, Big Brother started getting some attention. Mostly directed at Janis. They went on their first nationwide tour, and they took it seriously. They practiced, for a change, and they all finally got their act together. Good new covers, and some good new songs by Sam Andrew, the five of them grew up and learned how to play for people who sat and listened. The tour turned them into a rather good band, working very well with Janis, whose hurricane-in-a-duststorm approach was becoming popular. The last three shows of the tour were at Winterland, and this CD is drawn from those three shows. All of that hard work paid off. The band is very tight and professional, and they all sound happy. And then . . . 

Somebody listened to somebody's bad advice and pulled out the wrong Jenga block. Later, probably 1969, I saw Janis fronting the band that she put together, more like the band that was put together for her, after that somebody had talked her into dumping Big Brother. The new thing was called "The Full Tilt Boogie Band" or something. It was a very professional outfit, in both the positive and the negative connotations of that word. Never a big fan, I remember thinking that Janis was a better band member than a band leader. 

Much later I bought this CD. Janis had been dead for over twenty years by then. I realized that the band, including Janis, had really turned itself into something that they could be proud of. I thought, good for them. I hope that the guys made a living.

She Married Me Anyway

Some people hide their true natures from others as a way of sneaking their faults under the radar until it's too late. They go out on dates and order mineral water, instead of their usual six or eight cocktails. They turn down reefer at parties, when they usually smoke a gram every couple of days. Ladies, be careful. That ardent lover that you're considering marrying may turn out to be a selfish and lazy lover after the honeymoon. Look for the signs, ask around. I don't know how you discover the truth. I ain't no Dick Tracy. But try.

Some men, like me, are the opposite. In fact, I tend to broadcast my true nature, my likes and dislikes, very early in any budding relationship, whether potentially a friendship or a love interest. I have abandonment issues, and one way of avoiding abandonment is to clear the air right away so that there are no surprises. If there's something about me that you don't like, I won't be keeping it a secret. Better that you know these things right away. The sooner you skate, the better it will be for both of us. I'm not here to waste anybody's time.

I kept no secrets from the woman who became my first wife, that's for sure. She married me anyway. Much to her eventual chagrin. If you have any questions about our divorce, don't ask me. I never understood why she loved me, and I have certainly never understood exactly why she kicked me out. But honestly, can't we agree on this? It would have been better if she had stopped returning my calls after the first few months. Better than kicking me out after we had raised two children together, and we were both already on Medicare.

Surely, she saw the signs. I was totally indifferent to making a living. In fact, my favorite form of employment was unemployment. I was a bundle of nerves, a hive of anxiety, and deeply angry and depressed. I drank alcohol every day, and I preferred to sleep very late. Along with my friends, I bought my share of everything that we could get our hands on. My friends and I enjoyed it all together, on a very regular basis. I hated school, although I was a voracious reader of unassigned materials. I hated conformity, authority, work, society, my parents, politics, and myself.

Even my positives were annoying. I was a serious, motivated movie fan when we began to date. No, I was a serous fan of cinema, that's it! Cinema! World cinema! I'm still a fan, but for about ten years there I was crazy on the subject. I went to see films two or three times every week, either alone or with a friend. The Italian Neo-Realists; the French New Wave; silent films; Bergman; Fellini; screwball comedies; and, perhaps especially, Japanese movies. Art houses, museums, re-run theaters, the tiny Japanese-only theater west of Broadway in the high-40s, wherever the good stuff was being shown cheap. I guess I did begin by taking my then girlfriend to sure things, like “Blazing Saddles,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” or maybe Marx Brothers' movies. Who doesn't love the Marx Brothers? But I went too far very quickly.

We went to see a triple feature one time. Was it at the old New Yorker theater uptown? Yes, it was. The first movie was “Un Chien Andalou,” by Luis Bunuel, credited, I believe, to Bunuel and Salvatore Dali. That film was, let's say, experimental. Surrealism on the movie screen. I was spellbound, so I didn't notice that she was less than thrilled.

The next feature was, “The Night of the Living Dead,” the original, about a year after its first release. Again, I was fascinated. Not just to be watching the movie, but to consider how one very talented man could have put that movie together for almost no money, obviously having to spoon-feed all of the (probably) amateur actors all of their lines and stage direction. It was a real triumph of the will. The will of one man, “I'm going to make a feature film, damn it!” My future wife was unimpressed. No, that's not true. She totally hated it.

Bear in mind that the theater was crowded with very respectful cinephiles. It was the times.

The third movie was Ingmar Bergman's, “Hour of the Wolf,” which, to be fair, can seem a bit obscure to the uninitiated. Again, I was too wrapped up in the movie to notice that my girlfriend was grinding her teeth, sitting there like an unexploded bomb, with her arms tightly folded and her chin making a mark on her pretty breastbone.

“That's the last time I let you pick the movie!”

If you had asked me, at the time, to make a list of everything that I loved about her, I could have filled pages. If you had asked her to do the same thing about me, she might have sat there for five or ten minutes with a furrowed brow, chewing on the pencil. The nicest thing that she ever said to me was, “at least you're not boring.”

In light of subsequent events, she might have added, “. . . yet.”

Lee Dorsey - Sneakin' Sally Thru The Alley [7"] - 1970

You might also like Robert Palmer's cover of this song. Many of the same musicians on both versions. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!