More on Politics and Religion

Jesus said you cannot love both God and mammon, for you will inevitably hate one and love the other. “God” does not mean some white-bearded dude up in the sky. “God” means truth, integrity, justice, and compassion. Mammon means money and fame. The trouble with the Democrats is that they attempt to love both, so they’re always in turmoil and confusion. The Republicans confine their love to mammon—to mammon alone. That’s why they’re able to be so disciplined. But it’s the path to ruin.

Jesus was a Socialist

I opened up my browser to see on the main page of the New York Times web site a photograph of a crowd of angry right-wingers who had flown to D. C. to protest the health care bills currently before congress. One man was carrying a sign saying “No Socialized Health Care.” Well, I for one want socialized medicine, and something considerably more “socialized” than what is currently being proposed. But looking at that photograph, my strongest feeling was that the ideology of the men and women in that photograph needs to be thoroughly discredited. They call themselves religious, but they oppose true religious ideals whenever they encounter them. If he were one of their contemporaries, they would be calling their beloved Jesus a “socialist.” Jesus told the rich man to sell everything he owned and give it to the poor. If that’s not advocating redistribution of the wealth, what is?

Progress Report #22

I’ve finally finished the second draft of Chapter 10 of my book Street Song. It was so long that I ended up splitting it into two chapters 10 and 11—64 and 48 pages respectively. Tomorrow I begin work on Chapter 12—working title, “The Diamond-studded Highway”—in which I abandon everything and head down the road with $20 in my pocket and no particular place to go. Strangely, as I write this the song “Endless Highway” by The Band has just started playing on my computer. (It’s set to random play.)

Go on and walk that Endless Highway,
Walk that highway till you die.
All you children going my way
Better tell your home life sweet goodbye.

Back from Winnipeg

I just got back from the Gimme Some Truth documentary film festival in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I’m still coffee-free. Judy and I were invited to present the “Wild Parrot” film and do Q & A after—once again. It’s remarkable and pleasing to see how lasting the film has been. We enjoyed our stay in Winnipeg. The downtown area is unique and has a peculiar beauty. All the Canadians wanted to know what the hell is wrong with us Americans that we have such fear over government health care. Contrary to what the conservatives here say, the Canadians are quite happy with it.

I’ve found that my energy is much better without coffee than it was with coffee. All I’d been getting out of coffee was maintenance—keeping the monkey off my back. I have no craving for it and I feel better throughout the day. I don’t think quitting will slow my work down at all. I feel that I’ll be able to sustain longer writing sessions. No crashes.

Progress Report #21

I wrote The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill on three double espressos a day. I’ve been working at Street Song on two double espressos a day. For reasons that I won’t go into right now, I decided to purge the caffeine out of my system. For the last two weeks, I’ve been having some foggy days—been in a foggy daze. It’s been difficult to work on the book and impossible to work on this blog. I’m pretty clear now, though, and I find that I have much better energy without all that caffeine in my veins. In two days, I’m leaving for Winnipeg to attend a film festival where they’re going to show the parrot movie. I’ll be back early next week, and then I’ll start posting again.

Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize

I was surprised and somewhat amused to see the news this morning. While I understood the impulse to give it to him, I didn’t see him as truly deserving it. Now I’m rethinking. Who has been, in fact, the greatest threat to world peace in recent years? The American neocons. They had both a demented world view and the military power to try to implement it. It was Obama who took them on and derailed them. And of course the Republican Right is enraged over the awarding of the prize. They know why he was awarded it. The inference is that they are a dangerous lot, enemies of peace—which they are.

Progress Report #20: Theory and Practice

Whenever I’ve sat myself down to work on the “final” outline for the book—and I’ve done this several times now—I’ve chopped the story line into blocks that I think make sense. But I always find that when I get into the actual writing, things change.

The chapter that I’m working on now, what I’ve been calling Chapter Ten, or “Warm Love,” ended up at 104 pages (double-spaced). That was after the first pass at this, the second draft. Usually, as I make my second pass at a chapter draft, I’m able to shorten it by cutting out both stuff that I know won’t go into the final draft and the redundancies that invariably sneak into the manuscript. Furthermore, I always see myself cutting even more material on the final draft as I discover what is truly vital and what is not. This time, it’s been different. As I’ve made my second pass, the chapter has been growing. When it reached a 110 pages, I knew that it wanted to be two chapters. I saw that  there was a natural place to make the division. So now I already have Chapter Eleven (working title “Conquered in a Car Seat”). But I’m still working on my second pass at “Warm Love.”

I’ve begun to enter the heart of the book, and all my old outlines are suffering for it. That’s the way it goes.

CBS Radio News

I’ve been in the habit of listening to the local all-news radio station, KCBS, at the top of the hour, once or twice a day. I’ve been doing it just to hear the basic headlines. You never get any depth from that kind of program, and I’ve never expected any. But in recent years, I’ve been noticing an increasing right-wing slant—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—to even this small corner of the media news. It’s been bugging me, and today I reached the point where I’m no longer willing to endure it.

This morning, the newsreader announced that the American government was having its first one-on-one contacts in around thirty years with the Iranian government regarding its nuclear program. That would have been enough for me. But he then went on to play a brief comment from Elliot Abrams, one of the most arrogant neocons in the United States today. I doubt that many Americans remember who he is, but Abrams worked for both the Reagan and the George W. Bush administrations, and while he was in the Reagan administration he was criminally involved in the Iran-Contra affair. He has a vehemently pro-Israel position that he pushes constantly, and that’s relevant, of course, to the issue at hand. I was appalled that he was introduced as merely a fellow from some blandly named think tank giving his professional analysis of the situation. Abrams deemed the talks a complete waste of time, and there was no one from any other side to balance his statement. It’s not healthy to allow propaganda to have access to one’s mind. So, just as I refuse to set foot inside any business that has FOX News on in the background, I won’t be listening to the CBS Radio News anymore.

A Leech on the Body Politic

I’ve had a particular image running around in my head for over a month now. This August, when Judy and I were up in the State of Washington, my home state, we passed through the town of Aberdeen. The highway passes right through the downtown area, and we got stuck there in a traffic jam caused by road work. The condition of the downtown area shocked me. There were dozens of boarded-up buildings and others that had been left just to rot. There weren’t many people hanging around, even though it was the center of downtown. Parts of it looked similar to places I’ve seen in rural Mississippi. At the edge of the blighted downtown is a river. (For those who know Aberdeen, there are actually two.) You cross the narrow river, the Wishkah, and as soon as you reach the other side, there’s a big shopping mall where the parking lots are filled with cars. It was all Wall Mart and Home Depot—all the big box stores. With no distance between the two to create an illusion of separate “ecologies,” you see directly how the mall is a giant leech sucking the life out of the town of Aberdeen.

I know the arguments of those who defend malls and chain stores. They say that people are free to spend their money however they please, and that the decisions they make are based on their own best interests. It’s the magic of the marketplace! But something that is truly good doesn’t leave a blighted landscape. It’s considered bad form to call into question the wisdom of “the people.” But the people are the object of expensive and cynical advertising campaigns designed to convince them to buy things they don’t need and aren’t good for them. We live in a culture that encourages instant gratification, ignores long-term effects, and mocks any idea that requires labor or a subtle view. Most of the money that the people spend in those stores leaves the local area for corporate headquarters. The image of the leech sitting right across the river, right on the vein, as it were, provides a material display of that reality.

Lane Tietgen’s Wheel of Fortune

The Cover to Lane Tietgen's CD "Wheel of Fortune"

Lane Tietgen’s album Wheel of Fortune is finally available on cdbaby. I recommend it highly. What follows is the broad outline of Lane Tietgen’s story and a  review of the CD by his fellow Kansan musician, Steve Strickland. To read my own comments, click on the “Lane Tietgen” tag at the bottom of this article. Take it, Steve…

Wheel of Fortune’s 10 songs have a familiarity about them stemming from the fact that Lane Tietgen is a contemporary of the artists of whom the music is reminiscent.These songwriters who for the most part were already involved in music at the time of the British Invasion of the early-mid 60’s shared many of the same influences: from the blues to jazz to the folk archives of Harry Smith and the Lomax’s – and all American music up to that point. This is to say that Tietgen knows the way to the well and has his own bucket.

The Serfs, the preeminent Kansas bar band in 1968, scored a record deal with the Capitol label. The band formed around Tietgen (guitar and bass) and Michael Finnigan keyboards (principally Hammond B-3) in Lawrence, Kansas, but was based primarily out of Wichita. They were to be produced by Tom Wilson (Dylan’s producer of the period) who had recommended the Record Plant to Jimi Hendrix’s people as the happening new place to record. Working down the hall from each other, Hendrix recruited Finnigan and Freddy Lee Smith (sax) and Larry Faucette (congas) to play on “Rainy Day, Dream Away” and “Still Rainin’, Still Dreamin.’” The Serf’s Early Bird Café was an adventurous album featuring Tietgen’s originals with covers ranging from Dylan to Miles Davis. Perhaps too eclectic for their own good and because perhaps Wilson couldn’t get a handle on what they were all about, the record went nowhere.

Finnigan recorded two more legendary-in-musician-circle records, The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood (Columbia) and Crazed Hipsters (with Jerry Wood, on Blue Thumb), in 1970 and ’72 relying heavily on Tietgen compositions before going on to a storied career as sideman deluxe. The second track on the Finnigan & Wood album, “Highway Song,” contains the lyric “So I took a job out on the road/I was a tent-show roustabout/But when I asked to know their code/That old ringmaster threw me out.” Evidenced from his first album in 40 years, it may be that Lane Tietgen not only cracked the code, but also took over his old boss’s job.

The title track begins with some hand-jive, body slappin’ percussion and sets the blueprint for much of what follows. Lane Tietgen sings in a raspy tenor with urgency and a yearning that belie his age. He consistently employs a melisma that sounds both middle-eastern and bluesy. “Wheel of Fortune” could be a collaboration between Jerry Garcia and early Steve Miller. It features an allegorical feminine trio on a tear, like up-dated figures from a Zap comic. The percussion, programmed by Dave Westerbeke and analog played by Adam Berkowitz, grooves without being overbearing. The listener is most often not aware of which is which. Tietgen uses mandolin as a rhythm guitar as well as playing acoustic, slide, electric wah, harmonica, bass, organ, accordion, and trombone—sometimes all on one song. He also arranged the horns. Terry Anne Gillette, on loan from the Deadish The Thugz, plays violin on this and several tracks in a style that harkens to Scarlet Rivera’s work with Bob Dylan.

“Deep Waters of the Heart” expands the aquatic motif of the first song—a rollicking number worthy of The Band at their best. “Sweet Alchemy” is an unabashed love song in the mode of “Tupelo Honey.”

“Some Call It Evil,” a narcotic ska piece, protests corporate genetically altered agriculture. It features an incredibly catchy trombone riff with the mandolin carrying the offbeat. Tietgen’s voice conveys indignation without sounding whiny. If one didn’t know better, it could be mistaken for a Toots Hibbert cover.

“My Heart’s One Desire” would be the side one closer were this a vinyl release. It combines romanticism with an unspecific spirituality. Dave Westerbeke, who instigated this project, handles the backing vocals as well as lead guitar and bass. The harmonies throughout are California sunny. The melodies on all the material are whistle-friendly catchy.

Like many classic albums, side two is even better than the first. “Love and Redemption,” the record’s centerpiece, has a poignant chorus about “Margdelena lighting her candles for all the unfortunate ones.” The accompaniment features a call and response between arpeggiated acoustic guitar and Gillette’s violin. It’s a beautiful ballad with a big backbeat. It contains romance, religion, political commentary, and eroticism effortlessly.

“Raindrops on the Page” is a tour de force lyrically & instrumentally. Molly Ann is a longtime member of some traveling show replete with roustabouts, grifters, a gambler, and a thief. There’s an apocalypse goin’ on. Accordion and harmonica playing together can be a dangerous combination for pitch, but it works here, along with Tim Cain’s saxophone. It makes for a cacophonous but not discordant soundscape that supports the cinematic tale. Shades of Blonde on Blonde and Band & Street Choir era Morrison mixed with a little Ray Bradbury.

The song sequencing on Wheel of Fortune is remarkable as “Eight Ball Blues” finds Tietgen channeling Leadbelly and Robert Johnson in a nicely minimalist setting featuring Lane’s twelve-string bottleneck and Berkowitz’s brushwork with strategic bass guitar shots. A short story of Hemingway-worthy brevity and this great line “The Devil walked in wearing a pork pie hat…a little goatee and eyes just like a cat.”

“Mamma, Bring That Good Thing Over Here” continues the rootsy denouement with playful innuendo over a piedmont-style rag. Westerbeke plays his one solo of the record like Michael Bloomfield morphing into James Burton – all in 12 bars.

I came to this recording with only the slightest familiarity regarding Lane Tietgen, aside from the songs sung by Finnigan mentioned earlier. Driving home late at night on a rainy highway listening to the CD, the epic “MLK Riot 1968” came on. I immediately flashed to Hendrix’s “Somebody’s House is Burning.” It occurred to me that the legendary Serf’s album and Hendrix’s third album happened at the time of King’s murder. The song recalls “All Along the Watchtower” (Dylan’s original) and “Hurricane” with a very personal narrative.  Accompanied by acoustic guitar and banjo, the tale clocks in at nine minutes but doesn’t seem the least bit too long.

In the couple of months since Lane gave me this recording, I’ve done a bit of research and have cajoled my old college room-mate out of a digital copy of the Serfs’ CD. The things that strike me are the vocals: Finnigan and Tietgen’s voices haven’t changed much in 4 decades. Lane, in particular, has become a much better singer. And as a songwriter he has few peers. The songs from the past hold up as classics all, but this material shows an empathy and maturity and makes this listener hope there’s more to come. —Steve Strickland