Click images for desktop size: "Autumn Colors" by NFL Films There's an old vaudeville joke, one of those routines that requires a top banana and a stooge.
The stooge walks into a used clothing store and asks about a suit. The top banana gives him one that is way too large and cut funny. The stooge complains that the pants sag. The banana shows him how to stick his hand in the jacket pocket and pull them up. This keeps going on and on. No taper on the jacket: just hold your arms like this. Sleeves too long: hold your elbows in like this.
Until finally the stooge is standing all knock kneed, hump backed cross eyed and distorted like some Picasso sculpture made flesh. The stooge buys the suit and walks down the street.
Click image: "Mountain Peak Winter" by Maxfield Parrish
The stooge passes two guys lounging by a lamp post, reading the paper, as guys used to do back in those days. One nudges the other and they stare at the stooge as he shambles down the street with his bizarre knock kneed posture and roiling gait.
"What do you think is wrong with that fellow?" asks guy one.
"Beats me," says guy two, "but don't his suit fit nice!"
Curtain, guffaws and applause.
Right now I feel sort of like the stooge.
If I hold my mouth just so it minimizes the discomfort. Holding my head about like this cuts back on the feeling that a 6 penny spike is driving through my throat. Squinting my left eye like Popeye
Click images for desktop size: "Shanna" by Frank Cho stops it feeling like a poker is piercing my brain etc etc.
Nothing does much to stop the dull tooth ache like pain in my bones. Its a sort of phantom pain anyway. More discomfort than pain really, like a bad memory you can't shake, a bad dream that persists through the day.
I'm not worried. Just uncomfortable. I still trust my puppy to tell me when I'm in trouble. She gets overly attentive and clingy when I'm in trouble. Right now she just doesn't want to share the bed and wants me to make breakfast faster. So I'm clearly fine and not worth wasting precious brain cycles over.
I'm still playing the guitar everyday. Trying to limit it to an hour or so a day, I've got no speed or strength in my fingers. I'm buzzing strings even on simple open chords. I'm curious to see if the strength comes back. I decided I need to limit it because after about 3 hours of noodling about on Sunday I discovered I couldn't grasp the lid on a jar of olives tightly enough to open it.
No big deal. I'll take it as a great sign if my fingers get stronger. Proof positive that my body isn't dead. Not dead at all.
I love the little guitar. Starting to remember some chord progressions. The body is still far behind the mind but that's to be expected.
Yesterday I read more about the recent grief and the RIAA.
Some mawky conservative think tank has come out and criticized the courts. They think the RIAA has been reasonable . . . there's a lot of lawyer gobbeldy gook in the paper. Jerks use lawyer talk when they have no justification. Does anyone not know that yet?
The main argument is that the RIAA should get what they want because they want it. Its not the RIAA's fault that their lobbyists rammed through a poorly conceived draconian law that gives the RIAA everything and the public nothing. The people should just be grateful that the RIAA allows them to breathe and give up the cash.
Charlie Neeson, the Harvard law prof fighting the RIAA n simple constitutional facts stated that perhaps its time for the RIAA to stop thinking the world owes them a living and to figure out alternative ways to make a living.
Neeson suggested something like making the music free and embedding adverts n the tracks. Which I think is pretty stupid but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and think that it was just a thought off the top of his head. He does point out that the millions of bucks that the RIAA has extorted via threats and the courts has still not found any of its way to the artists. Its just being used to feed the legal machine and extort more money. Its the new RIAA industry.
Thing is that the RIAA is redundant. Musicians have always been ripped off. For the most part they didn't care.
The deal used to be that the musicians mad records and the record producers kept all the money. The band used the promotion of the records to sell out live shows. They made serious bucks that way. Both sides. The producers a lot more than the musicians.
The RIAA's big job was setting up some standards to make sure that records all had an acceptable EQ curve so that they'd sound like something when played through the crappy phono stylus. (When CD's became big a lot of them sounded pretty terrible because the record labels were dumping them out there with the same old RIAA EQ that they needed to have translated by
Click images for desktop size: "Beyonce" cartridges and needles for vinyl. I still sort of figure a lot of the love people have for vinyl is the love for the high compression and steep roll offs required to get vinyl to reproduce noise.)
The best deal musicians ever got was when the bands would first start up. You'd record some tracks at an 8 Track studio for like 15 bucks an hour, print up your own CD's for like a buck a piece, have the lead singer's girl friend, who was always an art student someplace, design a cover and a label, run them off and then sell them at your shows for 5 bucks a piece, 10 if the band got big enough.
We might not have known it then but those were the best days. Ambition has a nice way of hiding happiness from you.
Thing is I still don't need the RIAA and the corrupt disdainful musicians who embrace them. There's plenty of music out there that's not owned by anybody but the people who love it, who make it and who listen to it.
Oh, there's a question I can answer. Lars, drummer from Metallica, the hypocrite who started and embraces the RIAA's legal onslaught, he who sold a painting this weekend for 14 million dollars isn't giving half the money to the artist not even 10 bucks. See, he doesn't have to. Fair use act or something.
One thing I've been listening to a lot is compilations. The great ones are where a bunch of disparate bands with a common thread get together and try and get some attention by packing a disk with all killer no filler tracks.
With my garage love I particularly like this new one called, "Be A Caveman." Lots of good to great bands, like Events doing "She's Our Girl".
An old compilation that rocks is "Teenage Riot." Its all vintage stuff with a JD zip gun attitude and a switchblade edge. Doofus tracks like Reggie Perkins doing the theme for "High School Caesar" make
Click images for desktop size: "Considering An Empty Future" by Unknown me smile. The whole disk is filled with wild tunes, radio commercials for wilder films and the frequent totally cool tracks like Little Johnny and the Rumblers covering "Riot in Cell Block Number 9".
A newer surfish band on the scene are The Crimson Ghosts. Their CD "Some Kinda Hits" is one of those things where every song sounds like a forgotten song buried in your head. Nothing really tears your head off but nothing makes you reach to push the button for the next track. Nice and solid stuff like Their cool and reverb drenched cover of the Misfits "Attitude"
The Sand Rubies out of Phoenix continue to impress me. Their cover of Arthur Lee's "Signed D.C." gets a double RAH! and a Yow!
All you got to do is listen.
Finally this morning I woke up with a clear memory of a Jan and Dean song. It was a great tune, lush production sparse but meaningful words. Probably from that great period where everything Jan Berry dreamed was an instant hit. Except I can't seem to find it and now I'm wondering if they really did it.
Then I wondered if all the guitar noodling had made me write a new song. Possible. I'm usually half asleep when I write anything, except I remember once waking up and thinking I'd written an awesome song. The first line was. "She walks in beauty like the night . . . " It was three days before I found out that somehow George Byron had some how time travelled from to the future and stolen it from me . . .
I remain skeptical about my "genius".