A musical/psychological distraction from the ongoing horror

I fixed dinner tonight and had the GF over (a joy to be around, nicest woman in the world), with several blues CDs in the background (Robert Cray, Willie Edwards, Junior Parker, et al.) as we ate and drank.

Eventually, the talk turned to singing. After decades playing in bar bands, where I let my “fingers do the walking,” (and if you recognize that reference, you’re dating yourself), last winter I decided to try my hand at vocals after our new band’s vocalist ghosted when we had three-and-a-half sets of material down and I was ready to start booking us. (No obvious problems musically or with anybody in the band, no warning — he just disappeared. I’m still slightly pissed at the lack of courtesy, but mostly disappointed and mystified, as we sounded good and were almost ready to go.)

So, we were high and dry. To keep things from crashing, I decided to try my hand at singing, and I sucked. Bad. I’m not quite as bad now, but still not good. I do a decent job on about 10 songs (embarrassingly badly on maybe another 20), but am obviously in the “Our guitar player will sing one for you now” category when we have a better vocalist. (Any good, local (Tucson), left-of-center vocalists reading this, please leave a comment.)

Anyway, the GF has a great sense of rhythm (good dancer) and seems to have an instinctive understanding of the blues (she’s lived a hard enough life for it–which, frankly, is important if you’re gonna get it right), but when I suggested that I haul out the acoustic in a “judgment-free zone” and play a few tunes with her doing vocals, she recoiled in horror, and said she “can’t” even try it — which meant “won’t.”

I’ve run into this over and over, including with myself. I’ve been playing in bands for decades, but it’s only over the last half-year or so that I’ve even tried singing. With the blues band (great players one and all), none of them would even do shouting (no singing, no being on pitch necessary) in call-and-response tunes. I’d go, “C’mon! you don’t even need to sing! Just bounce off me!” And they wouldn’t do it. No way, no how. They were petrified. They’ve all spent thousands of hours playing their instruments, and are all great players, but vocals? No way, no how. The horror! The horror!

This caused me to look at my own previous reluctance to even try singing, and to remember what I was telling my self-sabotaging self when I chickened out:

• “I sound like shit! I’ll be humiliated!”
• “I can’t stand it if that’d happen!”
• “It’d be awful! Absolutely awful!”
• “I’m such a good player, I shouldn’t need to sing!”

I still sound like shit (mostly–pretty decent on a few tunes), and am still embarrassed by my vocals, but here’s what I tell myself to keep the anxiety under control:

• If I sound like shit, it ain’t the end of the world;
• What’s the worst thing that could happen?
• Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan both thought they sounded awful–were they? (In other words my self-criticality isn’t necessarily accurate.)
• Again, if I make a fool of yourself vocally, what’s the worst that can happen? Will I die? Go bankrupt? Will my honey walk away from me in disgust because of bad vocals? (No)
• Would I be better off if I sing, even badly? (Yes)
• Most people are so self-absorbed they’ll barely register whether I’m good, bad, or indifferent. So, why not?
• The critical jerks are mostly a bunch of insecure, incompetent assholes, too — so why not?
• What real harm can nasty comments do to me?

And that’s the key: what you tell yourself.

With singing, get over the initial embarrassment and you might have a hell of a lot of fun. Maybe not, but why not try? You have nothing to lose except your embarrassment.

 

Huge E-book Sale

Over half of our e-books will be on sale starting today, and will be available at all of the usual e-book vendors (Kobo, Apple, Amazon, etc.). Most are priced at $.99, and none of the sale titles are above $2.99. Here are the temporarily reduced e-books:

Science Fiction

• Sleep State Interrupt, by T.C. Weber
• The Wrath of Leviathan, by T.C. Weber
• Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia, by Zeke Teflon
• The Watcher, by Nicholas T. Oakley

Classic Fiction

• The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition, by Upton Sinclair

Anarchism/Politics

• Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle, by Rafael Uzcátegui
• Venezuelan Anarchism: The History of a Movement, by Rodolfo Montes de Oca
• The Heretic’s Handbook of Quotations, Chaz Bufe, ed.
• The Best of Social Anarchism, Howard Ehrlich and a.h.s. boy, eds.

Science

• Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology, and Politics in Science, by John Grant

Humor

• The American Heretic’s Dictionary, by Chaz Bufe
• Bible Tales for Ages 18 and Up, by G. Richard Bozarth

Atheism

• Disbelief 101: A Young Person’s Guide to Atheism, by S.C. Hitchcock
• Spiritual Snake Oil: Fads & Fallacies in Pop Culture, by Chris Edwards

Performing Arts

• Stage Fright: 40 Stars Tell You How They Beat America’s #1 Fear, by Mick Berry and Michael Edelstein
• An Understandable Guide to Music Theory: The Most Useful Aspects of Theory for Rock, Jazz, and Blues Musicians

Definition of the Day 4-3-20 — Musician

(We’re all  under a lot of stress right now and could use some comic relief; there are many other pieces on line showing exactly how Il Douche, Dumbasso Cheetolini, has royally screwed up America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic (here’s a good one from today), so I’ll be keeping the posts mostly on the light side for at least the next few weeks if not months, and also will be dipping into ones from the past. (We have over 1,500 archived posts, including over 500 in the humor category.) Here’s one from about five years ago that is, unfortunately, all too relatable — or at least will be again soon, I hope.)

MUSICIAN, n. A guy who spends five thousand dollars on instruments so he can drive a thousand-dollar car a hundred miles to make fifty bucks.

–Thanks to Mick Berry (former bandmate, drummer extraordinaire, and co-author of The Drummer’s Bible)

for this one

A thoughtful, sensitive message from Motley Crue’s Drummer

An Open Letter to the president
from Tommy Lee
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dear Fucking Lunatic,
At your recent press conference – more a word salad that had a stroke and fell down stairs, you were CLEARLY so out of your depth you needed scuba gear. Within minutes of going off air your minions were backpedaling faster than Cirque De Soleil acrobats… In India a week ago, i couldn’t get past the bit about your being the most popular visitor in the history of fucking India — a country of a BILLION human souls that’s only 3000 years old, give or take.!!! Trust me – Gandhi pulled CROWDS.. You pulled a cricket stadium and half WALKED out…

Do you know how fucking insane you sound, you off-brand butt plug? That’s like the geopolitical equivalent of “that stripper really likes me” — only 10,000 times crazier and less self aware.

You are fucking exhausting. Every day is a natural experiment in determining how long 300 million people can resist coring out their own assholes with an ice auger. Every time I hear a snippet of your Queens-tinged banshee larynx farts, I want to scream!
We are fucking tired. As bad as we all thought your presidency would be when Putin got you elected, it’s been inestimably worse.

You called a hostile, nuclear-armed head of state “short and fat.” How the fuck does that help?

You accused a woman — a former friend, no less — of showing up at your resort bleeding from the face and begging to get in. You, you, YOU — the guy who looks like a Christmas haggis inexplicably brought to life by Frosty’s magic hat — yes, you of all people said that.

You attempted — with evident fucking glee — to get 24 million people thrown off their health insurance.

You gave billions away to corporations and the already wealthy while simultaneously telling struggling poor people that you were doing exactly the opposite.

You endorsed a pedophile, praised brutal dictators, and defended LITERAL FUCKING NAZIS!

Ninety-nine percent of everything you say is either false, crazy, incoherent, just plain cruel, or a rancid paella of all four.

Oh, by the way, Puerto Rico is still FUBAR. You got yourself and your family billions in tax breaks for Christmas. What do they get? More paper towels?

Enough, enough, enough, enough! For the love of God and all that is holy, good, and pure, would you please, finally and forever, shut your feculent KFC-hole until you have something valuable — or even marginally civil — to say?

You are a fried dick sandwich with a side of schlongs. If chlamydia and gonorrhea had a son, you’d appoint him HHS secretary. You are a disgraceful, pustulant hot stew full of casuistry, godawful ideas, unintelligible non sequiturs, and malignant rage.

You are the perfect circus orangutan diaper from Plato’s World of Forms.

So fuck you Mr. President. And fuck you forever.

Oh, and Pence, you oleaginous house ferret. Fuck you, too. You’ll be as useful as a chocolate teapot against a medical crisis you Bible thumping cock socket.

Suggestions on avoiding boredom in a time of plague

I’m going stir crazy, and I presume damn near everyone else is too — and after only two weeks.

After thinking about how much you dislike this mild form of isolation, please think about all of the prisoners subjected to total isolation for months or years on end — think about how they feel, what it does to them. And then think about how the government you support subjects people to such psychological torture.

Whatever. Here are a few things that might help you pass the time in your mild form of lockdown:

• Archive.org  has a very large library of classic films, including a very nice collection of films noir. All are free.
• Kanopy features the Criterion collection of films and many others, and is free on many public library sites. The film I’ve seen most recently that I’d recommend is Harrod Blank’s (son of legendary countercultural director Mel Blank) Wild Wheels, a wonderful documentary about art cars and their creators. If nothing else will do it, this will leave with a kinder view of humanity, its creativity, and a smile on your face.
• Learn the night sky. The best free tool to help you do this is Stellarium (free download). Probably the best planetarium program, regardless of cost. Even if you just have your naked eyes, you can learn the constellations and follow the planets. If you have even cheap, small binoculars, Stellarium will open a whole new world of deep sky objects to you; and if you have even a cheap kid’s 60 mm telescope, wow are you in for some fun — especially as both air pollution and light pollution abate with the coronavirus tragedy. (Always look on the bright side of life.)
• Learn to sing or play an instrument. Even if you just have your voice, there are a lot of vocal lessons available on Youtube. Singing is also a great shame-attacking exercise. If you have even a cheap instrument available, there are likewise a hell of a lot of useful instructional videos. One Youtube channel that I’ve found particularly useful is GuitarPilgrim, though to take full advantage of the videos you need to be at least an intermediate-level player. Whatever, the guy is an incredibly good guitarist and also incredibly good at explaining how to do things. I can’t recommend this more highly — it’s head-and-shoulders above all of the other instructional guitar videos I’ve seen.
• Write. If you’re reading this, you have the means to do it. Nowadays, there are an incredible number of aids available, both in your word processing program and online. My favorite tool is probably the self-explanatory thesaurus.com. And buck up — today, you have it good: take advantage of all the tools. For both nonfiction and fiction, it’s a great idea to write a highly detailed outline before you start writing. You won’t follow it, but it’s a great jumping-off point.
• Garden. As long as the water stays on, you’re good. Even if you’ve never done it before, it should be pretty easy. I live in one of the most hostile environments in the U.S. for gardening (alkaline, nutrient-deficient soil, low rainfall, brutal sun), and I still get good yields. If I can do it here, you can do it anywhere. A lot of public libraries have seed catalogs which will help to get you started. Helpful hints: start small — if you’ve never gardened before, start with a garden of under 100 s.f.; buy seeds or get them free from a seed catalog — do not buy individual plants for $3 or $4 apiece from a big-box store. They’re an incredible rip. Six-packs for $3 or so aren’t a bad way to go (far from great, but not terrible), but spending three bucks or more for a start is obscene. And then start saving seeds and saving money next year. (Sorry to sound so mercenary, but cost is a consideration, even with treating Mother Earth well. And I hate ripoffs.)

Much more on all this later.

For now, please meditate on how the government tortures your fellow human beings with solitary confinement.

A Bit of Music-Psychology Humor

A couple of nights ago I was talking with my longtime friend, ex-stand-up comic, and ex-bandmate, drummer extraordinaire Mick Berry. We’ve both been working on our vocals recently, but for very different reasons: me, because I’m sick of dealing with egomaniac vocalists; Micko, because he’s sick of dealing with musicians period, and wants to go out and do solo gigs playing piano and singing.

Anyway, he suggested that I do some singing and let him critique it. I panicked. Over the last year, I’ve sung several times during jobs at bars and thought nothing of it, but this spooked me: Micko actually has ears and I value his opinion; this is in stark contrast to audiences, who (god bless ’em)  tend to be way too forgiving.

Anyway, Micko finally talked me into it, and I reluctantly said, “I’ll do it as a shame-attacking exercise.”

He replied without missing a beat:,”You didn’t realize that all music performance is a shame-attacking exercise?”

Things to Come (with the blog, See Sharp Press, and yours truly)

The good news is that we’re not out of biz. And if we (See Sharp Press) can survive this, we can survive anything (barely).

We have a couple of really good new books coming up within the next few months (release date depending on the pandemic), Chris Mato Nunpa’s Great Evil, about Christianity the holocaust of Indigenous peoples and the ecosphere, and the Bible; and the conclusion of T.C. Weber’s Sleep State Interrupt anarcho-thriller trilogy, Zero Day Rising.

Beyond that, since I have little else to do in self-quarantine other than tend to my pets/owners — at times an inverted relationship — play music, write music, and work in the garden, I’m pretty safe. According to the CDC, Arizona is one of the states that has widespread community transmission of the coronavirus, so I rarely go out. When I do, I bump doors with my shoulder, and punch screens with a plastic bag between my hand and the screen. I still want my IPA, but hey, I’ll live (or not) if I don’t get it.

As for books and blog posts, Dakota elder Chris Mato Nunpa’s The Great Evil will be out in June; and I’m making huge strides with 24 Reasons to Abandon Christianity — about 30,000 words in at present.

Also, I’m well on my way to recording two music CDs. Between mine, my good bro’s Michael Turner’s, and the ones I wrote with my friends/ex-bandmates Brian Hullfish and Michael Zubay, we have two full CDs+ of original material. We’ll probably use the name Blues Evangelists (spreadin’ the good news of the blues.)

Other than that, I’ll be finishing off the graphic arts work for Al Perry’s new all-instrumental CD., for which Winston Smith did the cover graphic, after a water color by Al. I’m doing everything beyond that, and Al did me the honor of asking me if I’d play second guitar when the CD release finally happens sometime this fall down at Club Congress. Of course I agreed. (Here’s a link to one of Al’s funniest recent tunes, Jukebox Jihad.)

Enough for now. I’ll put up another post within a day or two with a lot of actually useful shit.

It’s going on dawn, and Red is rising. “Red” is the formerly skeletal, now plump, Rhode Island Rhode Red rooster who showed up here last June, and rooted around in my garden for a week or two, until I started feeling sorry for him and started feeding him. The neighbors did, too. He became the neighborhood pet. Dumb as a box of rocks, but still pretty and lively. They’re talking about buying some hens and putting up a hen house in their backyard.

I hope they do it soon.

 

 

 

Late-night Thoughts on Songwriting

by Chaz Bufe, author of An Understandable Guide to Music Theory

Yeah, I know. This would carry more weight if I were better known, but I’m not. I think this is good advice, anyway.

Here are a few samples of my songs for you to pick apart. (A note on the first song: I am a former postal worker.)

• Postal
• Pinche Blues
• Life Is Good
• Abductee Blues

Hemingway once said, “Write drunk. Edit sober.” That’s great advice for writing fiction and for writing songs (not so much for writing nonfiction). The takeaway is not to self-censor: knock the “what are you doing!? that’s awful” devil off your shoulder and just have fun. Who knows what you’ll come up with?

Of course, most of what you come up with won’t be good. So what? If even 5% of what you write is decent, let alone good, you’ll be ahead — you’ll have written something you wouldn’t have written if you’d self-censored. (The self-damning, self-censoring devil is far from infallible.)

Beyond that, here are a couple of other ideas:

• Record every session where you’re trying to come up with songs
• If you can’t record yourself and come up with something you like, play it over and over again, at least a dozen times: that way, there’s a decent chance you’ll remember it.

And another:

• Either have a lot of beats down in your head (e.g., standard shuffle, 12/8, standard rock beat, polka, samba, standard swing beat, 3-2 clave, soca, waltz) when you write songs, or listen to rhythm tracks with the various beats. (Self-advertisement: About 20 years See Sharp Press published a still-unmatched encyclopedia of beats with close to 200 of ’em on CDs, The Drummer’s Bible).

That’s it. Some people claim to come up with good songs by writing something everyday, which is plausible — and will mostly result in crap; but again, that 5% that might be good . . . — but the best ones just seem to come to you whole. They usually take no more than a half-hour to write. The two examples above being Postal and Abductee Blues.

Don’t self-censor and have fun.

 

 

Bar Band Review — Good Players, but everything else was wrong

No, I’m not going to name the band or the bar, which would give it away.

They were incidental to why I went up to the local dive to watch the ‘9ers game. Unfortunately, the band came on during half-time, so I had no choice but to listen to them.

All of them were good to very good players (the bassist), and I haven’t heard so much wrong with a band (maybe three bands combined) in ages.

Here’s what was wrong:

• They were way late setting up, the earliest of them arriving half-an-hour before they were due on; (normally you want to be there at least an hour before);
• The drummer didn’t arrive until 20 minutes before they were due on;
• He was so late they didn’t do a sound check;
• They didn’t have monitors;
• All they were miking was the vocals;
• And as a result, the mix was way off during the first set, with the snare way too loud during the first three or four numbers;
• Because they didn’t do a sound check, the vocal mics were feeding back, sometimes painfully, for half the set, and they didn’t have anyone riding the board so they didn’t adjust for it;
• Despite the feedback problems, the vocals were too far down in the mix (yes, it is possible);
• It sounded like the vocals were dry (i.e., no reverb or other FX);
• On the final two or three tunes, they had some idiot sitting in playing claves badly — think the clunk, clunk, clunk of “Magic Bus” rather than the
  clink, clink, clink that you want — and just enough off the beat, and irregularly so, that it was annoying as hell;
• They had two — not one, but two, count ’em, two — keyboard players, and on many of the numbers the keyboard player playing lead was using a soul-sucking artificial synth sound a la The Cars that was abandoned for good reason back in the early ’80s;
• I didn’t like the guitarist’s tone (too muted in an attempt to be pretty — but that’s just me);
• And (a more general whine) they advertised themselves as a “soul” band, but they didn’t do soul — they did lounge, the closest thing to soul being their closing number, Al Green’s “I’ll Be There”;
• And, of course, just covers, no originals — it ain’t that hard to write originals, but writing good ones is another matter; why most musicians don’t even try it is beyond me.

At the break, they finally did a sound check. I had to sit through their first couple of numbers in the second set before the ‘9ers kicked the winning field goal in the final seconds. (Go ‘9ers!)

What I noticed was:

• The feedback was finally gone;
• The balance was a bit better
• The vocals were still too far down in the mix;
• They were still dry;
• And their material was almost as awful, non-soulful ands non-original as in the first set.

The lessons here are pretty obvious:

• Get there early enough to do a sound check;
• Do a sound check;
• Use monitors;
• Mic everything (and I mean everything);
• If you’re not competent to do a good mix, have someone along who’s competent to do the sound;
• And above all deliver what you promise: if you promise blues, play blues; and if you promise soul, play soul.

 

 

 

 

 

Musical Tip of the Day: How to Play Claves (hand percussion) Correctly

by Chaz Bufe, author of An Understandable Guide to Music Theory.

The word claves refers to two things (in English): the rhythms underlying Afro-Cuban music (especially the two-bar “son” or 3-2 clave pattern: 1, and of 2, 4; 2, 3 — a long pre-existing, basic pattern which Bo Diddley somehow had the balls to relabel as “the Bo Diddley beat”); and the approximately 9″-long (23 cm) hardwood sticks (usually mahogany or, here in the Southwest, ironwood), one slightly smaller in diameter than the other.

Claves are almost always misplayed on rock recordings. (They’re normally played correctly on Afro-Cuban and Latin Jazz recordings.) Why? Rock musicians simply don’t know how to play them properly, and so get the dreary “clunk” sound — exemplified on the Who’s “Magic Bus” — rather than the much brighter “clink” sound when properly played. (The “clunk” is produced by wrapping your hands around the claves and banging them together wherever’s convenient.)

So, how do you play them correctly? There are three things to keep in mind:

• Do not wrap your hands around them. Rather, cup your hands, grasp both claves about 60% of the way up with your thumb and index finger, and rest the butt on the heel of your hand. Again, do not grasp them.
• If you’re right-handed, hold the smaller (skinnier) of the two claves in your right hand — it’ll produce a brighter sound when you strike it against the other. (If you’re left-handed reverse this: the thing to keep in mind is that the smaller clave is the striking clave.)
• And strike the clave in your left hand about an inch or a hair over (about 3 cm) from the end.

Do this, and you’ll get a great sound — better (at least in this regard) — than The Who. It’ll take a bit of practice, but you’ll get there quickly.

 

 

American music, musicians, and race prejudice

“It’s all American music.”

–Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown

I had a long talk this pm with my pal George, an old-pro and great drummer I still sometimes play with, an Italian guy from New Jersey, who was Frank Sinatra Jr.’s drummer for years; we talked about music, musicians, and racism. (George loved Frank Jr., says he was a great guy.)

He told me a story about one of the first things that happened after he moved here (Tucson) from New Jersey. George has the gift of gab, and he got a job working for one of the local Ford dealerships. On his first day, he all but sold a Lincoln to one of the ranchers from up Route 77 north of town, and the jerk came in the next day, spoke to the manager, and said he wanted the car but didn’t want to buy it from an Italian. The manager saw George, said “stay out of the way, I’ll sell the car, you’ll get the commission, and from now on your last name is Joseph.”

George was shocked by the anti-Italian prejudice, something he’d never run into on the East Coast.

But race prejudice and anti-semitism was something he well understood, from anti-black, anti-white, and anti-semitic prejudice in daily life and the band scene in NJ. (There were white-racist and also all-black clubs where they didn’t want mixed-race bands, which is what George always played in.)

It’s so fucking stupid as to be mind boggling.

But it’s there.

And it breeds in isolation. In isolation from people of different races and ethnicities.

That’s one of the great things about most types of American music, especially blues and jazz: you end up playing, often for long periods, with musicians of other races and ethnicities. And you become friends, you come to understand the brotherhood of man (at least the brotherhood of musicians).

In my case, I’ve for years played with black folks, white folks, Mexicans, Native Americans, and Jewish folks. That’s pretty much par for the course for a blues musician. After a while playing with someone, you simply stop thinking about race or ethnicity. You just take them for who they are: Cliff, my black pal the drummer, becomes simply Cliff, my pal the drummer.

About the only places where you’ll still find race prejudice in the American music scene is in (yes — shocking, I know) country and certain types of hard-core rock and roll.

Other than that, we all tend to get along. We have to. It just works that way.

It works out the same in neighborhoods. I live in the most densely populated, most integrated neighborhood in Tucson, which is the most integrated major city in the country. My neighborhood (Keeling — neighborhood motto, “It’s better than it looks”) is about 65% Mexican, 25% white, and 10% black (almost no Native Americans or Asians). And we mostly get along fine. We’re on top of each other, interact every day. And it’s fine, very relaxed.

As a middle-aged ex-gang banger neighbor from Cleveland (a self-described “retired Crip”), put it, “it’s paradise.” In other words, almost no racial tension and almost no overt race prejudice. I couldn’t agree more. This neighborhood is dirt poor, “hard scrabble” as the local paper put it a decade or two ago, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

If you want to get rid of race prejudice, get rid of race isolation. That’s the way it works in bands, and that’s the way it works in neighborhoods. Isolation breeds fear and hate.

 

 

 

Developing Good Time

(First off, apologies for any grammatical or other lapses in the following: I haven’t slept for two nights, now, and am feeling a bit tetchy.)

Anyway, getting to the topic at hand, I played two-and-a-half sets at one of the local bars on Thursday night, and two songs in I wanted to kill the bass player (no drummer).

Why? His time sucks. He was pushing the tempo in almost every song. And that was exhausting for me, trying (unsuccessfully) to hold him back. His poor sense of time/rushing robbed me of most of the joy of playing music. I felt like King Canute, trying to hold back the tide with a pitch fork.

And that’s totally unnecessary.

It’s easy to develop a good sense of time. It’s boring, but it’s easy. Spend fifteen or twenty minutes a day on it for maybe three months, and you’ll have at least a decent sense of time. Most amateurs never attain that, which is why they remain amateurs.

My pal/bassist told me something the other night that was incredibly revealing: we were playing with another friend, a drummer, and the bassist was screwing up all over the place. At one point, when I waved my hands and said “Stop!” he was half a beat in front of me. His excuse? He couldn’t hear the bass drum — as if keeping time wasn’t his responsibility (as it is for everyone; but in a band it comes down like this: drummer first, bassist second; guitar/keys third; and in the absence of a drummer, it’s the bassist’s job.)

So, how do you develop a good sense of time? As I said, it’s easy but boring. Here’s how to do it:

• Use a metronome. Play scales, play along with tunes (the drummer is almost certainly playing along with a click track). Metronome apps are easy to find and are free. There’s simply no excuse for not using one. Use a metronome or metronome app fifteen minutes a day for three months, and you’ll have decent time. You’ll find it boring, but it won’t kill you. And other musicians will want to play with you. If your time is crap, the good ones won’t. Suck it up and do the necessary work.
• Subdivide. Get in the habit of doing it. In straight time, count 16th notes (“one-e-and-a two-e-and-a” etc.) or in swung time (“one and a two and a” etc.). I went out dancing with the GF recently, and she told me she could see me mouthing the subdivisions. It’s a great habit to get into.
• Play slow. And count. It’s way easy to get into playing fast passages and then telling yourself, “Damn! That sounds good!” Slow it down, count it, and you’ll have it.

If you think that’s too boring, and won’t do it, you’ll never be any good.

 

Disgusting Dishonesty on Healthcare

No, we’re not talking about Trump, for once. We’re talking about the disgustingly dishonest ads claiming that Medicare for all will increase healthcare costs.

How stupid do they think people are? (The question answers itself.)

The insurance industry is buying tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions in ads attempting to convince morons that having a parasitic middle man in the healthcare-supply chain is somehow good, that it’s somehow good supporting a parasite whose only function is to extract the maximum amount of dollars in return for providing the minimum amount of healthcare.

You can gauge how effective that system is by realizing that the per-capita cost of healthcare in the U.S. is twice (often more) that of any other industrialized country, and that, in contrast with those countries where healthcare is universal, we have close to 40 million uninsured people and half-a-million medical bankruptcies annually.

The insurance/pharma vampires are spending massive amounts of money on online ads: Last night, while I was accessing on Youtube the Alacranes Mojados tune “Chorizo Sandwich” and Jonny Chingas’s “Se me paro” and “El Corrido del Bato Loco,” (yes, “bato” — perhaps the funniest tune ever recorded; the other two are close), I was assaulted with corporate ads opposing universal healthcare. These corporados, these merciless assholes, are targeting the people who have most to lose if they buy their death-dealing/profitable bullshit.

If you ever wanted proof that capitalism is inherently evil, this is it. Death and misery in pursuit of profits. Those responsible should simply be singled out, lined up against a wall, and shot. I’d happily pull the trigger.

Robert Cray review 9-2-19 Tucson

I’ve been wanting to see Robert Cray since he released a number of great blues albums in the 1980s, notably Bad Influence, Too Many Cooks, and Strong Persuader, which featured great songwriting, vocals, and guitar playing, and which were basically an updated version of (jazz influenced) West Coast Blues — and I finally saw him last night.

Technically, all of the guys in his current band (especially Cray and the keyboard player) are great, and sometimes it’s just nice to see good players do their thing.

Having said that, I was bored shitless. Cray played somewhere between 16 and 20 tunes (counting the two encores — kudos to him for that), but all of the tunes were in a very narrow tempo and rhythmic range: all in straight time, but for a single song, and almost all in a very narrow tempo range I’d estimate at about 100 – 120 bpm. A lot of the time the drummer was just playing a standard rock beat and minor variations thereof. That ain’t blues, no way, no how. The only remotely interesting beat was one the drummer did on the snare and kick drum, shuffling the first beat, and then doing the rest straight (One …. a 2 and …. and 4) while using a shaker in his right hand. As well, the structure of a good majority of the tunes was quite simple, and had nothing in common with blues progressions, let alone jazz progressions.

In other words, Cray wasn’t playing the blues: he was playing rock with a very thin blues veneer.

The horrible part is that most of the audience loved it (about 10% of the audience walked out, to their credit; I would have, too, but the GF was into it). The only changes in the tempo were in the final tune before the encores (about 140 to start and ramped up a bit from there) and the second, slow encore, which was probably in the mid-80s).

I’m very glad that I got comps for this — yes, I’m biting the hand that fed me — but Jesus F. Christ, seeing Cray playing this formulaic crap is depressing. He used to be so much better than this.

Assuming he continues this crowd-pleasing, money-making crap, I wouldn’t drive across town to see him.

 

Country Music Quote of the Day (Al Perry)

“The only thing hurts now is the pain.“

 

My good bud Al Perry will have a new CD out soon, and I’ll be doing the graphic arts design for it, but for the cover graphic by Winston Smith.

As if to prove that Tucson is the smallest million-plus town in the country, one late recent night I met a guy at a Q-T to buy an equipment rack in the parking lot around midnight off craigslist. He stepped out of his truck, and it was Loren Dircks, guitarist from Gila Bend. One of Al’s longtime close friends, and a fantastic guitarist and good guy.

Another thing about another good guy — I wrote to Junior Brown recently and heard back from his wife, Tanya, about the guitar stand he uses in place of a strap. (I could probably use four of ’em — one for a solid body, another for an acoustic-electric, a third for a six-string banjo, a fourth for another acoustic-electric or solid body tuned in open A.)

The guy who built Junior’s stand, Michael Stevens, was good enough to write back and tell me how to build such stands. He didn’t have to do it — it was just out of the goodness of his heart. What a nice guy.

Yeehaw!

This sort of shit happens all the time around here. You think Austin’s cool? It is, but welcome to Tucson.