Demo for Jericho Surrenders... Plus: PK & Michael K. Williams

... so I wrote this about two years ago. Never liked the music I came up with for it. Also, the lyrics were not quite there. I picked it up last week again for reasons that shall remain unclear to me for a long time. I played it for Jeremy Blair, who pinpointed the lyrical weakness in the song. So I worked on that, and recorded it with just a guitar and bass. It may end up on the next record, it may not. Too many songs like this and the next record will be as sad and depressing as the last one. Shit, even I don't want that... how would we bill ourselves? Slingshot Cash, like "Quaalude's set to Pedal Steel"? no thank you.
I wanted to talk about Michael K. Williams' great role as Chalky White on Boardwalk Empire. He was Omar Little on The Wire, TheBestFuckingTVShowEver. His new role is still a gangster, but very different than Omar. He is a bootlegger, and the de facto Godfather of the Black community of Atlantic City in 1921, but he is also a suburbanite in a way. His wife and children are respectable and listen to classical music and talk of college and eating duck. Chalky is illiterate and loves Hoppin Johns and knows race politics both between whites and blacks as well as within the black community. MKW is fantastic.
I got back into Boardwalk after reading about the 1920's in Paul Krugman's book The Conscience of a Liberal. It is the story of how FDR and the New Deal gave us an affluent middle class and the apex of American economic power. He begins by talking about how unequal the 1920's were and how we are now, nine decades later, back to that gross inequality, an Oligarchic rule by the top 1%. It's shocking and depressing, but he does make the case that we can have that kind of country again, minus the racism and sexism, if we wanted it. It was done before and can be done again. OWS is a good first step, but the next is to push policy...

Anywhen, here is the link to the new song. It's called Jericho Surrenders. Enjoy.

http://www.reverbnation.com/slingshotcash

Cant' spell

Yeah. Where O where are you when I need you spell check?

the latest things...

Writing random things in blog. Every day is the goal. Why not? Nothing better to do. Time, like a liver, is meant to be wasted.

... spent last night on air wcom... oh yeah. Should have let you know about that. damn.

Slingshot Cash will be at the Cave on Thursday Nov. 10 with Bevel Summers. Good show in the basement. Drunken rants will flow....

Were O were are you, drummer? Any drummer.

Joining Effingham on Sat. November 12 in Raleigh. Playing bass, marveling at Dwiggins' drum kit, and the many awesome hats of Jeremy Blair.

My phone bill and anxiety remain large and unresolved.

less now, more later.

Too Big To Fail

So I wrote this song about the banking crisis and the attendant mess about two years ago. I never made a proper recording of it, and never played it outside of my living room. It was pointed out to me by my photographic friend, the talented Agatha Donkar, that the song is sadly still relevant. So I threw together this rag tag version of it yesterday. The link also has lyrics.
The Revolution will be televised after all, Gil.

to hear it:
http://www.reverbnation.com/slingshotcash

What the Eff

I will be playing bass for Jeremy Blair's most excellent Canadian All-Stars of Americana - hey 4 of the 5 guys in The Band where from Canada, we need to get over it (Canadicana?) . Effingham next week at the Pinhook. I look forward to it, and got a preview by seeing them this past Thursday at the Station. While I enjoyed their set as always, one could not help but be mesmerized by the awesomeness of Effingham's drum kit. It was like a sighting of a rare Full Thrusher BangaGong, which is indigenous to Americana. That kit looked like a dream, a kaleidoscopic cake filled with strippers and cymbals.

I have been practicing.... we remain quietly confident.

check them out:

http://effingham.bandcamp.com/

later, britches.

back

SO I took a few months off. Actually more like years. Depression is an insidious thing, and it becomes so much a part of you that you no longer notice it. It becomes your baseline.

My Air Conditioners - window units - stopped working this summer. In August. In 90 heat during the day, 75 at night. I started getting sick from them. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and cough for hours, and a few times, I'd throw up. Charming.

One day while sweating and awaiting the repair man to bring them back, newly cleaned, my fever broke. I realized I was holding on to a lot of things that had no use for me, now or back then. So I let em go.

I ran into someone whom I don't know very well the other day. She said I looked different somehow. She's right.

anyway. good to be among the living again. more to follow.

The Party Ain't Over

She comes out to her back up band playing Rumble by Link Wray. An old man with perfectly combed-back white hair ambles up on stage and looks for her mike. Then from behind a curtain, he helps her up on the stage, a tiny woman under five feet with a glorious beehive sitting atop her head without apology or a strand of gray, a white fringe jacket and an enormous smile on her face. She is 73 years old. She dated Elvis. She had hits before she graduated high school. She faded. She found Jesus. She toured and recorded in Europe. She kept on. Jack White made a record with her, and she stands before us at the 506 on a Tuesday night to a not quite sellout crowd, but big. A crowd stuffed with bouffant hair dos and poodle skirts and tattoos and a band who featured only one guy under the age of 40.

You sometimes hesitate to see an “Oldies” show. One, because it is a weird idea. Why is it that anyone before the Beatles - who were not so innovative in their sound, nor in the look of their identical suits they wore and whose sole cache seemed to be 'O my god, they are British' -is consigned to the bargain bin of rock history as an Oldies act, and the graying Anglo-American jet set of the 60's are Classic Rockers? It does both parties a disservice, but especially anyone around from before February of 1964. Wanda Jackson is one of the few who remain as she started so young and managed to have a series of careers as the world of music consigned the beginnings of rock 'n' roll to a prehistoric era. The 50's rockers who were filled with passion, killer music and sex and violence as much as the 60's rockers were, are kind of a forgotten and even lampooned part of pop music history. She didn't sit by and watch it go. In the 60's she was a big star in country music. In the 70's (According to her testimony last night, it began on 6 June, 1971) she found Jesus and Gospel music. In the 80's Europe found her. Mr. Gillis found her in 2009 or so. And we found her on a stage in front of us.

I was a little nervous. What if the night would be like the 1973 World Series, when a 42 year old Willie Mays, a man who made the most famous catch in baseball history in the 1954 World Series, fell down going back on a routine fly ball and looked terribly, irrevocably, mortal? No one likes to see a star fall. Yet the star doesn't see it that way. No one does or should do music or art or baseball or accounting for an audience. You do it for you. Our postmodern postwarholian world of instacelebutants and reality TV and tabloid politicians seems to think that everything needs an audience. It doesn't. At least I think it doesn't... but. You don't, at least I hope, make love with an audience in mind. O wait – pornography. Okey. Well, how about child rearing? No. We have people making money by insisting they know the secret to happy, medicated robots – errr – children – is to give in to their every whim, or to chain them to a tree with the family dog.... well, you see where this is going. The audience is all of us, and we are each the stars of our own lives, and so we go to a club on a Tuesday night to view history.

And you are exhilarated because it isn't history. It isn't nostalgia. It is a great singer with stage presence and funny stories and touching ones, a woman who if you closed your eyes, you could hear her singing to seduce you and doing so, who was genuine and without irony, who was having fun. It is one of life's great mysteries. The question of why get out of bed in the morning. I think it is to hear Wanda Jackson stand on a stage and still matter. She didn't still matter because she still mattered to me or the club owner or the (very excellent) back up band. Wanda Jackson clearly still mattered to her. That is something that few of us feel every day, at 23 or 73, but ought to.

Thanks Wanda. It was a great party.