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It’s Smokey

July 15, 2019 By admin

In the early 80’s, I was playing with the Bernie Pearl Band and one night we opened for Smokey Wilson at The Music Machine out on Pico on Los Angeles’ Westside. Smokey was a real showman; he fronted a 7 piece band with a horn section and sported a powder blue 3-piece suit with a cowboy hat to match. He’d hit the stage after his band warmed up the audience with two or three tunes.

In those days, Smokey traveled in a trailer. At some point during Bernie’s set, my girlfriend Lynda took him out there for a little taste. I don’t know how much of our set he actually heard but when we came off, he told me he liked my playing and invited me to sit in for his set. We had a drink at the bar and he said, “once the band gets going you come up with me”. We had a couple more shots and I asked him what key the band would be in when we hit the stage. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Son, I play so many keys”.

As we walked toward the stage, I still didn’t know. We passed the horn section on the way to my spot and, in desperation, I asked them for the key. The trumpet man said “F#”. F#! A lot of harp players don’t carry a “B” harp which is what is needed for cross position in F#. Smokey strapped on his guitar, grabbed the mike, looked at me and said, “take one”. We’re in F# and he puts the spotlight on me right out of the gate. But the trumpet man saved my ass. If no trumpet man, I’m punked in front of a full house. I tore up that solo and Smokey ignored me until his final song. It was ok with me because fitting in with a solid horn section is one of my favorite things.

Smokey’s gone now, but he taught valuable lessons for harp players that night: be prepared for the flats and sharps, beware of a guitar slinger in a powder blue suit and always make nice with the horn section.

For the record, according to L.A. bass player Ron Battle, that trumpet player was, most likely, Joe Campbell. This many years later, thank you Joe. Smokey will never know.

Rick Smith is a musician and harp player (that’s a harmonica folks) from Helendale, California.

Filed Under: ARTS

Greek Choruses
Descriptive of Online Dating
Especially After Sixty

November 6, 2017 By admin

You left your pride in the horrors,
The desolate errors
— Giuseppe Ungaretti

See, evening’s shadow quickly turns to night,
and we are still hungry for love.

*

We are not fecund, not firm, our infirmities even more
bounteous, but we still fancy riding the wild horse!

*

Progress wreaks havoc with courtship,
our life stories reduced: “How I spend Friday nights,
My favorite movies, Six things I could never live without;”
I weep, no good can come of this.

*

Beware, you women, of images of shirtless men baring
bulky bellies, or missing the tops of their heads due
perhaps to a purposeful camera. Shun too the juveniles
sending come-hither messages, secretly wishing to marry
their mothers: No good can come of this.

*

Lo, here is a man with promise,
plan an hour meeting where others congregate;
I lament, I tire: the odds are slim,
and what purpose, this?

*

We are keen for company of a kindred spirit,
the full spray of love’s pleasures.
Pray, what does the Oracle say this day?
Go, see the illuminated screen, swipe right.

Joanne Brown is a strategic communications consultant, writer, and poet. Her corporate work can be found at joannebrown.com, and her poetry has been featured in Persimmon Tree and Evening Street Review.

Filed Under: ARTS

Guitar Lesson

August 15, 2017 By admin

A R T S   If we are going to make music together there definitely need to be some ground rules. First of all, we will get along much better if you wash your hands, not sometimes, but as a matter of course whenever you are even thinking about touching my body parts. Who wants germs and/ or lunch fragments coming between us in this relationship? We might not be curing cancer here, but I know that you know that I know that we are going to be intimate. So let’s start off clean shall we?

Your first assignment will be to give me a name. Just do it. B.B. King, Eric Clapton and Willie Nelson all have names for their guitars. Anyway you don’t want to be in a relationship where you don’t have a name for the other party. Imagine a life of being referred to as hey you. The wrong name is like a wrong set of strings. It will mess us both up.

So listen, while its’s technically true that I am Gretsch Boxcar Model 9200 serial number CAXR 165214 that you bought off the internet, can you fit all of that into a name? Meanwhile, before you commit, try using endearments such as “Good morning, beautiful. Are we ready to set the musical world on its ear today?” Yes indeed, you will need to talk to me the same way you talk to your golf balls or chocolate chips. It’s a relationship. We have to relate, Partner.

What a guitar has to say and the way it gets said is the foundation of a relationship with the human voice. Every guitar, of course, has its own particular sound, and it is important to not get in a hurry making demands or blaming each other when things aren’t exactly right between us. Does that sound impossible? Ask your teacher if you need clarification on any of this, and by the way, how’s it going with choosing a name? If you get stuck, consider Carmine, not spelled like the opera, but mysterious, a little wild, and red is the color of your true love’s finish.

I’d kind of like to wrap up this first occasion with an overview: in a relationship, the essence is in the relating. Remember the four agreements: “be impeccable with your word, don’t take anything personally, don’t make assumptions, and always do your best.”

So, same time tomorrow?

Anne Animas lives, writes and hides out in Southern Colorado.

Filed Under: ARTS

Flogging Plutarch

July 26, 2017 By admin

A R T S   Back, back, back, way back, in my high school freshman honors English Lit class, our teacher (who’d just arrived from pre-Summer of Love San Francisco) swathed our 15 year-old brains with classical music from then underground FM radio as a backdrop to the classical titles we were expected to read in class. These included Homer’s Odyssey, a small selection of the Poems of Ovid, Volume I of Plutarch’s Lives, and a poet of our own choosing. I chose the decidedly unclassical Jack Kerouac. It was 1965, after all, and I’d been drawn to the Beat authors, painters, and musicians since I was about 12.

Plutarch was difficult for me, but I got through it with Mrs. Ware’s accompanying mini-history lessons to explain who these people were. I think it was her class that sparked my interest in history, and I chose to read Plutarch’s second volume over the following summer vacation. Imagine that. Mod little me sunbathing in our back yard in my Hawaiian two-piece bathing suit and my perfect Pattie Boyd flip, listening to the Beatles and the Beach Boys on KRLA while reading Plutarch. Or trying to. Fortunately, my mother had raised me not to give up on a book however difficult, but to keep a notebook and a dictionary at hand, and to boldly annotate the margins. Predictably, I never checked Volume III out of our library, and soon, 1967 happened and I turned my attention to reading the popular books of the era: Brave New World, Siddhartha, and literally everything by Richard  Brautigan.

It has been 51 years since Mrs. Ware prised my eyes, ears, and mind open so I recently decided to give Plutarch another go. A free eBook is a free eBook, after all, and I decided, with both anticipation and trepidation, to flog through Volume III. I have to say Plutarch was much easier reading for me than he was in 1965. The vocabulary wasn’t an issue and the names were much easier to pronounce. Still, sitting down to read it felt like a chore compared to my accompanying reads, The Letters of Pliny the Younger and Stephen Fry’s Moab is My Washpot. Unexpectedly, I found the lessons in each of these books to be basically the same. Biographies, memoirs, and letters are interesting enough, but these books explore the moral and ethical characters of the authors and the people around them. What helped me most was my love of ancient and classical history. When I was younger I couldn’t put faces to Plutarch’s strange names. They weren’t people. Now, after a lifetime of autodidactic education, assigning humanity to these names was automatic.

So thank you, Mrs. Ware, for giving me the time machine that continues to take me places where I meet people I wouldn’t have otherwise ever known existed. Would that there were more teachers like you!

SK Waller is an author and composer. Books One and Two (With A Dream and With A Bullet) of her rock and roll series, Beyond The Bridge,  takes places in late 70s London. Read more at SK Waller Blog and SKWaller.com.

Filed Under: ARTS

Dylan Encounter

June 28, 2017 By admin

A R T S   I first encountered Bob Dylan in 1964 when I was asked to perform Blowin’ In The Wind at an Elks dinner in Ballard, California. I was a tender 12 at the time and I’d actually been asked to perform two songs that night. The other was If I Had A Hammer. I’d heard that song the year before on the popular TV show, Hootenanny! but I’d never heard Blowin’. I loved that show. I’d watched Sing Along With Mitch and played albums by Joe and Eddie, the Kingston Trio, Odetta and many others since I was a kid so when Hootenanny! aired, I was hooked. It was in fact the popular single, Walk Right In by the Rooftop Singers that fired my obsession with the 12-string guitar so I guess you can say I’m a folkie from way back.

Someone pointed me to Bob Dylan so that I could learn Blowin’ In The Wind for that gig, but I think I learned it from the cover by Peter, Paul & Mary. I liked the song. I thought it was pretty, but it was the lyrics that grabbed me. It sounded like an anthem. It was saying something important, a message I’d heard many times before, but this time it was delivered in a way that was like a bullet in the brain. I had to find the original recording.

When I brought home The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and tore off the cellophane wrapping, I had no idea my life was about to change and that it would continue to change and evolve for the entire time I’d walk this planet. I think I’d been prepared, though. I think all of those folksingers before had been leading me up that path, some gently—the Kingston Trio, for instance—and some not so gently, like Odetta. On that afternoon Dylan became a lifelong mentor. Oh, he doesn’t know that. He doesn’t even know I exist, but his work affected me like it has affected so many other songwriters. It’s safe to say I don’t where the hell I’d be musically if he hadn’t happened. I don’t know where music would be.

SK Waller is an author and composer. Books One and Two (With A Dream and With A Bullet) of her rock and roll series, Beyond The Bridge,  takes places in late 70s London. Read more at SK Waller Blog and SKWaller.com.

Hear Bob Dylan Recite His Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture

 

Filed Under: ARTS

Stuck on the Island

May 1, 2017 By admin

A R T S  There was an endless parade of silly baby boomer sitcoms. The best/worst is arguable, but the most iconic is clear. None reaches the pop culture television status of Gilligan’s Island.

Virtually everyone, including the creator’s agent, panned the idea before it debuted. The then-president of CBS West Coast remarked: “I thought it was a stupid show. Nobody liked it.” The network brass complained all the way to the bank.

The sitcom had solid ratings from 1964-1967 and attracted even more viewers in syndication, becoming one of the most re-run television shows. But wasn’t this at the same time that baby boomers were in “serious” rebellion against traditional values?

Hollywood legend Sherwood Schwartz said that he envisioned the castaways to be a microcosm of society who demonstrated how very different people could come together to help one another in a crisis. Who knew? It was a serious counterculture theme in clown-face disguise; maybe that’s why boomers dug it, even if the attraction registered only a subconscious level.

Schwartz wrote an “exposition” theme song—a music opening and summary repeated on each show—that told the complete story premise. Complete it was, the longest such song in television history. Schwartz overruled his writing staff who didn’t care for the idea or lyrics.

Hollywood gods work in mysterious ways. Schwartz wanted Jerry Van Dyke (Dick’s brother) to play the goofy, inept Gilligan. Jerry thought the show would never fly and chose instead to star in My Mother The Car, which barely made it through one season and is often judged the worst television show ever. Bob Denver’s role as beatnik Maynard G. Krebs on Dobie Gillis had just ended, and he jumped on the chance to be Gilligan, who was basically Maynard without a goatee.

A young Dabney Coleman auditioned for The Professor. Carroll O’Connor (Archie Bunker) tested for the role of The Skipper, which went to grade-B movie cowboy Alan Hale.

Jayne Mansfield turned down the role of Ginger, which fell to Tina Louise, known for serious (sensual) acting parts. There was a running battle between Tina and the producers over everything from Ginger’s personality and status to her costumes. She refused to go to Gilligan reunions and complained later that the role had destroyed her career as a serious actress, which gives new meaning to the phrase “whatever was she thinking?!”

No less an actress than Raquel Welch lost out to Dawn Wells for the character of Mary Ann. Dawn was a former Miss Nevada.

Terry Hamburg writes the Baby Boomer Daily about the exciting and revolutionary baby boomer years.

Filed Under: ARTS

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