Saturday Night Fish Fry

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You may thank frequent contributor and good friend of this blog, Anonymous, for suggesting tonight's visit by Chase, which must be the only prominent group in jazz-rock history to have used four trumpets, and four trumpets only, as its brass section. Listen to this mother!



Any geezers out there might remember that the band Chase was eponymously named for its leader, trumpet screamer Bill Chase. Chase (the guy) was old for a rock star, having been born in the middle of the Depression and having gotten his start with the original trumpet monster, Maynard Ferguson (whose lips must have been calloused thick as a catcher's mitt after decades of galloping after F over high C like it was his own fleet-footed strumpet). He then paid dues with Stan Kenton, and especially Woody Herman's New Thundering Herd through the early and mid-1960s. Anyway, my point is that the guy was a veteran jazzman before putting Chase together, so it must have been a blast for him to be, for at least a little while, a bona fide rock star. If you remember "Open Up Wide," then you'll probably also remember Chase's biggest hit, "Get It On." Here's a 1974 live Chicago performance of that tune --- a guerrilla home movie from an album release party about half a year before Bill and three other band members died in a plane crash. Check out the flowing shirts and --- gasp! --- the beards. These are the kind of guys who Buddy Rich mercilessly terrorized on the tour bus week in and week out (refer to the beard confrontation at about 6:00). No wonder younger jazzmen like Chase and Don Ellis tried to become huge rock stars instead! They shoulda stuck with it.

I seem to remember that the other three beardy trumpeters in Chase were also alums of the New Thundering Herd. All of them are adept at playing in this piercing brass register, and this particular chart really makes the most of those tones with insanely rich chromaticism and dissonances. Nobody I'm aware of ever used trumpets like this except Bill Chase --- at least not without another 15 pieces playing along. Nice use of the Echoplex at the beginning. Other than that, nothing to say except just listen to these staccato motherfuckers! And don't miss the rhythm section!

I owned the first two Chase albums back when I was a scrawny suburban delinquent, but I remember being somewhat bored by most tracks on those discs. I think the problem was that Chase and the boys tried getting a little too arty-farty (i.e., heavy) but couldn't quite pull it off in a way that the kids related to. They're probably worthy of revisiting in their entirety, however, just in case.

I read in the YouTube comments section that marching bands attempt to perform "Open Up Wide." I've never heard one try it. Sounds like a foolhardy task to say the least, if not less. A world-class bugle corps... maybe.

Open Up Wide, Chase (1971, from "Chase," Epic Records), via YouTube.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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"Turn into stone," I knelt to the hobo.



This incarnation of Blood, Sweat & Tears (1967-68) is probably the least known, but in my opinion it is by far the best-ever lineup. The band's sound is highly recognizable and unified from track to track, but every composition shows off a different facet of the ensemble's talents, not to mention Al Kooper's arranging genius. In addition to Kooper's original compositions, they covered tunes by Nilsson, Randy Newman, and Goffin and King.

Wikipedia and everyone else categorize BS&T as a jazz-rock combo, but that descriptor is much too narrow for the original lineup. The Kooper BS&T album, "Child is Father to the Man," begins with a formal overture that functions exactly as a classical overture is intended to, with much verve and wit. And near the end of side 2, "The Modern Adventures of Plato, Diogenes and Freud" pairs Kooper's intense psycho-philosophical lyrics with an orchestration that might be described as outre avant-garde pop.

"Morning Glory" is one impressive stop on this vinyl tour de force. The song was originally composed and performed in a folk style by Tim Buckley, with allegorical psychedelic lyrics by his partner Larry Beckett. You can hear Buckley's ethereal, elegiac treatment of "Morning Glory" here on YouTube. Buckley's style of music mostly has never appealed to me, and therefore I never would have heard this song if not for Kooper and his treatment of it. There's both a majesty and a foolishness to the arrangement that captures the psychonaut's innocent, earnest, and completely deluded expectation that enlightenment will be delivered on his desired schedule to the front door by a magic guru. As a teenager I would not have been able to extract any meaning from Buckley's languid performance of Beckett's creakily worded parable. Kooper and BS&T turned it into something a pimply suburban delinquent could relate to even before he discovered railroad-striped bell bottoms and incense.

Morning Glory, Blood, Sweat & Tears (1968, from "Child is Father to the Man," Columbia Records), via YouTube.

The power elites are sissies

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This Balloon Juice page has been hanging open in a Firefox tab on my machine for the past week. I wanted to link to it here for two reasons.

First, the author points out a corporate media meme that should be troubling all of us these days: the idea that us everyday slobs have no business criticizing individuals and corporations who turned the global financial system into a pyramid scheme or whose possibly criminal negligence is responsible for runaway pollution of the Gulf of Mexico, and by extension that the President of the United States --- our First Among Equals --- is an unseemly "bully" for threatening to hold them accountable for their acts. That meme, of course, does not extend to a president's nakedly unconstitutional breaking of international treaties, the instigation of illegal wars, the elimination of habeas corpus on demand, or the bulk wiretapping of electronic communications by innocent civilians --- it only applies to picking on corporations and the man-children who direct them.

Second, the post hints at just how unaccustomed to criticism and populist anger these elites have become after 30 years of The Good Life. There are PR campaigns, executed not only though advertising but by marquee-name news commentators, that scold citizens for "vilifying" financiers and oilmen for the destruction they have sown. Why would the captains of industry bother with such nonsense? Because we make them nervous. They do not like their parasitic livelihoods and lifestyles to be criticized, because they're important people and therefore entitled to anything they wish: unearned income, untaxed riches, unwarranted power, and immunity from accountability. They are nervous because many, many people are beginning to understand that they are parasites out of control. And that they are terrified sissies. There's not a man among them; candy-ass jabronis. Revel in their fear.

Recommended atmospherics for the general's exit interview

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On the slim chance that President Obama decides to take my advice on how to handle the problem with his allegedly insubordinate General Officer, then he also may consider my serving suggestion for the exit interview.

The general's seat at the conference table should be reserved with one warm bottle of Bud Lite Lime, placed on a TGI Friday's coaster. Obama should arrive at the meeting 15 minutes late with an ice-cold 40, two fresh packs of Philip Morris Commanders, and a box of kitchen matches. Joe Biden should arrive at the meeting 15 minutes early with two fifths of Wild Irish Rose (no glass) so he can keep the general company until the boss is done chillin'.

Undereducated guess [updated]

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Something about the layout and editing of the HuffPost front page from tonight, shown below, gives me the strong gut feeling that Obama will not fire his insubordinate 4-star general. Check the wording on the subhead: "President Obama Rebukes His Top Afghan General For 'Poor Judgment'."

Nope. If you're going to fire the guy, you don't make Peep 1 about it for the Tuesday evening headline writers. Why would the president bother with public "tough talk" before having the guy's ass on a platter in person? If my hunch is correct, I must say that it would be a really witless move with zero upside. BHO will get mau-maued whether he cans McChrystal or lets him stay. But in the latter case, Obama will also look like a king-hell pansy. And he should expect more of the same in his future. Limbaugh wins much less if Obama emerges from the oval office with the general's blood dripping from his socialist fangs.

No one is indispensable. Meanwhile, insubordination is unacceptable in any job, period, and it's always cause for immediate dismissal. Soldiers know this as well as forklift operators and Wal-Mart associates and Army public affairs officers. Maybe McChrystal wants to get fired and become the newest political darling of right-wingers (a role I still see Petraeus playing even if he retires along normal lines). So let him. Whether you support the Afghanastan mission or not, the good general has jeopardized its execution with his hi-jinx and he knows it. Not exactly a career-crowning achievement on which to base a political campaign, though. Basically, his motives seem pretty murky to me unless he just can't hold his Bud Lite Lime (the drinking of which should certainly be sufficient grounds for loss of rank and dismissal).

Update: Florida Rep. Alan Grayson has a few more reasons why McChrystal's presence can no longer be tolerated, including an incident last year when he publicly showed-up Obama about Afghanistan troop strength. And, incidentally and apropos of nothing, Grayson is my leading candidate to become the next Huey Long. Just a disinterested observation....

Saturday Night Fish Fry Junior!

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Hokey smoke, Bullwinkle! It's an ultra-rare Saturday night twin spin!



Why? Because when I walked into Schunck's (The Friendliest Store In Town, I'll have you know!) to shop for victuals this evening, I was pleasantly smacked upside the head to hear this terrific summer 1966 wimp-rocker in progress. It's a swingin' guilty pleasure, what can I say? Musta heard this repeatedly on transistor radios at the Indiana Dunes; I can practically feel the sun blistering my skin off and smell other people's suntan lotion as I listen to it.

This was the title tune from a comeback album by one Ezekiel Christopher Montanez. Wikipedia sez, "The title single from the album, sung in a soft, very high tenor range and played on primarily adult-formatted radio stations, confused some disc jockeys...." Haha! "Very high tenor" indeed --- I think they used to call that "alto." Anyway, the title single didn't "confuse" the program directors at WLS and WCFL in Chicago that summer, because that's where and when I done imprinted on it like a baby bird.

Other Wikipedia things I did not know: this tune was penned in 1945, and was performed earlier by Sara Vaughn, Nat Cole and Nancy Wilson, and even (date unknown) by the great Johnny Hartman.

The More I See You, Chris Montez (1966, A&M Records), via YouTube.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Uno!
Dos!
One! two! tres! quatro!



This proto-lummox-rock speaks for itself. That said, I will briefly point to a few amusing features of this video, of which I do not know the provenance. First, the Pharaohs look more like Sheiks than what they purport to be. Second, Sam is costumed more like a Sikh than a Pharaoh, but maybe that was why he called himself a Sham. Third, the boys give us a fresh and clever application of go-go girl technology, namely being that the cuties are as motionless as mummies throughout the performance. And fourth, Sam didn't need no stinking lip syncing, as is especially evident during the last chorus as his voice tatters and he even cracks up at being busted with it on live TV. Probably either one run-through or tequila shot too many before rolling videotape. Everything about it looks fun.

RubberCrutch Bonus Trivia! In summer 2007, inspired by my memory of these antic lyric stylings of Domingo “Sam” Samudio whilst being browbeaten by my Chinese date and a small roomful of her equally Chinese students upstairs of a campus bar at a private karaoke party, I plucked this song from the tune menu they kept shoving up my grille. "I'll fix their wagon," I thought to myself. The crowd went wild, so I ended up doing two more by request. And significantly, there was no alcohol whatsoever involved! That's what Sam means by "let's not be L7"!

Wooly Bully, Sam The Sham and The Pharaohs (1966, unknown live TV performance), via YouTube. 

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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So go on and live....



I fell in love with this song, like so many others in the 1966 - 1967 timeframe, before dawn. The situation was this: every Wednesday evening the Williams Press truck would engine-knock up our driveway and throw me a bundle or two of The Homewood-Flossmoor Star, the biweekly area newspaper. I would roll 'em all up in rubber bands (or when they were fat or I was lazy I'd use the flat trifold method) and get to bed early. Before bed, though, I'd snatch my sister Peggy's red and white plastic transistor Sears Silvertone radio/record player, which was the size of a Belgian paver but also a marvel of miniaturization at the time, and stash it with the bulldog edition of the Star in my old-school canvas paperboy bag. Then, around 4 or 4:30 a.m. I'd drag my scrawny carcass out of bed, get dressed, and head out into the suburban dark. The important thing was that radio, even more important than the princely paycheck. I started every Thursday all alone in the calm, dark reverberating open-air auditorium of suburban concrete, brick, and cedar siding with the predawn sounds of WCFL-1000, one of Chicago's two Top 40 powerhouses in the mid-'60s. (At that time WLS-890 didn't start broadcasting music until Chrome-Dome Weber came on around 6:05, after all the farmer nonsense.) These were formative mystical experiences for me, and I gratefully soaked up everything from The Casinos to the Doors. I remember first taking note this song, "Tell It Like It Is," around February 1967. This was the same month I heard the early-morning Chicago premier of a jaw-dropping Beatles song called "Strawberry Fields Forever," which literally brought me to a dead stop in the snow flurries as I tried to puzzle out its melody and structure.

So I originally felt a little weird about luxuriating in "Tell It Like It Is" because to my innocent ears it sounded like (wait for it) serious country and western! That's right: I heard it as a crossover country-pop tune (not actually knowing that term at the time), and it would have been damn uncool for me to admit liking such a thing in the winter of 1967 even as the crocuses of The Summer Of Love were starting to think about peeping their randy little budding heads up out of the earth. (Editor's note: some country was OK by me even back then, such as Roger Miller and a Jack Jones hit or two, but that stuff kinda at least sounded like rock.) It's not that I was some kind of proto-hippie or was even aware of such things beyond how they were made fun of on "Petticoat Junction." But it wasn't rock and roll, so what the hell else could it be!?! Sorta jazzy, but definitely not jazz. Well, "country" or whatever, I'd never heard a more beautiful rhythm guitar sound before then, and the piano and percussion kept things peppy with a 6/8 beat in back of the seductive melody. And that voice... like a choir of bells.

I rediscovered this song in the mid-'70s when I started hoarding 45 rpm records from thrift stores with Larry K. With more mature ears, informed by three semesters of college-level music theory (harmony), I was bowled over by it again. By then I'd recategorized it as "country soul" in my still-underdeveloped bean, and remember thinking to myself about Aaron Neville's vocal performance, "this guy is like a white Al Green!" I don't think that it was until sometime in the 1980s that I finally discovered that Aaron Neville and his brothers were, uh, black. Today I can recognize the vivid New Orleans flavor of the chart, especially in the horn sounds and even the rhythm guitar, but I still hear "Tell It Like It Is" as a small masterpiece of country soul.

Tell It Like It Is, Aaron Neville (1966, Par-Lo Records), via YouTube.

Apropos of nothing

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Office still life with margarita glass and melba toast resembling polar cross section of a lemon. Shot on iPhone 3G; cropped, slightly gamma-corrected, and sharpened using Adobe Bridge and Photoshop.

James Fenimore Cooper: hack literary prophet (featuring Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

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Apropos of nothing, my good pal Highly Osmotic Salami recently sent me the link to a rollicking 1895 critique, penned by Mark Twain, regarding the literary contributions of James Fenimore Cooper. You can read Twain's highly informative and entertaining essay here. Even if 19th century criticism is not your cup of tea or it runs too long for your tastes, I highly recommend that you scan the first few sentences, at least, and then sample some of the text after the numbered list, or else try the five paragraphs starting at the sentence that begins, "If Cooper had been an observer his inventive faculty...." Not only is Twain's use of humor devastating, as usual, but his application of language is at once both princely and accessible. There's barely a hint of old-fashioned rhetoric or vocabulary; mainly just the power of plainly written English, authored with craft and intent. I would be honored and amazed if I were able to roughly approximate Twain's elegant economy with words and discipline of tone. His late-life essays, which I devoured over 30 years ago but haven't much revisited, are never far from from the back of my mind.

That said, I think Twain was indulging in a bit of blood sport with the legacy of the late Cooper, who was considered a literary giant throughout 19th century America and also overseas. For example, although the point about Cooper's "singularly dull" word sense may be well taken, Twain's extensive catalog of the author's specific transgressions seems somewhat petty and academic, especially to postmodern citizens who have been forced to accept some unlovely aspects of rapidly evolving vocabulary and usage.

Having only once tried to read Cooper as 4th grader and becoming bored stupid within about 21 pages of The Last of the Mohicans, I can't claim any first-hand knowledge of Cooper's work or his career. But the absurd heroics that Twain amusingly deconstructs, such as the forest shoot-off where bullets hit bulls-eyes and then other bullets hit the earlier bullets, may have been intended less to withstand critical analysis and more to excite the minds and imaginations of young boys whose families were building new towns at the edges of frontier territories. If Cooper was a hack, then maybe he knew it and didn't care. Or maybe he even relished his role as a hack popular entertainer, endowing his canny woodmen and noble savages with the prowess of Olympians for pure diversion value just like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did in the 1960s with their own lovable and highly significant hack creations like Spider-Man, The Thing, the X-Men, and even the mythology-inspired Thor. Perhaps Cooper became a literary force mostly because the cultural elites said he was rather than by his own pretense. You know: just like John Irving.

Anyway, I'll probably never read Fenimore Cooper, in large part because of Twain's critique, which I can't help but to honor even given the churlish* undertone of it. But one of Twain's most devastating observations about Cooper's incompetence at writing dialog attracted my own postmodern interest, not only as the literary insult intended but also as a possible hint that Cooper may at the same time have been 150 years ahead of his peers in this regard. Says Twain:

The conversations in the Cooper books have a curious sound in our modern ears. To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man's mouth was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there.

In the bemused mind of Twain, who presumably had not traveled a century into the future and attended various Lynn Street happy hours, Cooper's dialog was surreal and insufferable. But if Twain's characterization is accurate, then Fenimore Cooper's dialog may have amounted to literary prophecy. Sometime soon, sit unobtrusively in a bar or coffee shop sometime, or maybe your own neighborhood gathering, and listen. Try the break room at work, or the weekly staff meeting. Or the Sunday morning infotainment shows. Listen intently for the "relevancy with an embarrassed look."
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* I learned the term churl in 1965 when Lee-and-Kirby creation Dr. Doom back-knuckled a hapless lackey with his iron gauntlet as punishment for some offense, real or imagined by the supreme despot of Latveria, and publicly denounced the poor sap as a "WITLESS CHURL!"

With regard to parasites

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Previously on Fifty50 --- last night, to be precise --- I compared the decay of our democratic and business institutions (not to mention church congregations) to what happens when a parasite thrives without any natural regulation and ultimately kills its host (and, a bit later, itself). But I'm not a biologist, so my parasitism similes may lack a certain technical "oomph" when critically examined. And with regard to the aforementioned post, there's a certain awkward mixing of parasitism similes and engineering metaphors. (That's one reason I write an E-list blog instead of textbooks.)

A favorite Big Hussein Otis metaphor for our current epoch is the 1960 George Pal film version of The Time Machine, portraying a future in which the hideous, animalistic Morlock society lures the passive, survival-challenged Eloi population to its underground fortress for the slaughter. [Editor's note: social metaphors aside, this is an awesome family film that every household should own, and is perfect for playfully scaring shit out of any 7-year-old who hasn't been raised on slasher movies.] I agree with BHO's assessment.

The Morlocks are an interesting crew. In a sense they're an apex predator, but they employ what might be viewed as a parasitic ranching strategy. (Again, caveat emptor with regard to my incomplete understanding of natural systems; Fifty50's technical monitors may feel free to help with refinement and nuance.) I say "parasitic ranching" because, if memory of the movie serves, the Morlocks provided no inputs to the Eloi flock --- no management was involved --- but simply exploited the atavistic Eloi response to civil defense sirens.  So the Morlocks might think they're the smartest guys in the room, and they probably are. But someone with a more sophisticated perspective, who incidentally is not in the room, can quickly grasp that the Morlocks do not have a sustainable "business model" for at least two reasons. First, lacking any stewardship of their food supply, the Morlocks are certain to exhaust the herd and consequently starve themselves to extinction. Second, it may be possible for the herd to organically develop a resistance to the parasite --- that is, adapt.

I wonder what would happen to our latter-day Morlocks if the Gulf Coast Eloi were to come under the influence of a 21st century Huey Long.

Another editor's note: the publicity photo of Eloi Yvette Mimieux and her Morlock captor, for The Time Machine (1960), is reproduced as fair use for purposes of literary criticism and social commentary. Thank you for your attention to this matter.)

Nonlinear times

The Portland Cement Association defines progressive collapse as "a situation where local failure of a primary structural component(s) leads to the collapse of adjoining members, which in turn leads to additional collapse." This dread phenomenon in structural engineering was the immediate cause of mass casualties in the 1995 right-wing terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.*

Progressive collapse also can occur under stresses that are otherwise nominal, but produce catastrophic failure when members or materials have been under-designed or have been subject to accelerated degradation that cannot support a design peak load. [Editor's note: at this point I welcome and invite the intervention of our local mystery technical phenom, who may go by the moniker of Professor Mahatma Kane Jeeves, to correct my imprecisions or to augment my explanations if necessary, or both.] As a general matter, progressive collapse considered a nonlinear event.

Since I first began to grasp the potential magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon oilwell disaster I've felt that this event --- which would probably be containable in an alternate universe in which U.S. democracy can marshal resources to serve the public good about as effectively as it did in the 1930s and '40s --- could start a cascade of environmental, economic, and political failures that industrial age institutions just won't be able to cope with. Our institutions are already run through with stress cracks and fatigue. The human institutions, public and private, have been rotting from the head for 30 or 40 years, and now they're necrotic right through to leech-filled guts. The parasites are killing their hosts. They think it's funny, and that the chaos they create means they're smart. They don't believe the concept of extinction applies to them.

I don't like my own melodramatics any more than I like anyone else's. But just consider how a few major stresses could play out directly, and consider the feedback loops that could get started. We have one of the largest environmental catastrophes of the industrial era, but it's not only making pretty birds oily and dead but also destroying the ecological services that provide income for tens of thousands of families along the "south coast." Meanwhile, rich people will not stand for restoring personal and corporate marginal income tax rates to a level that can sustain emergency government response to natural disasters, industrial disasters, or disastrous levels of U.S. unemployment. Bigots and know-nothings blame their usual suspects. Cracker politicians and infotainment media deliberately inflame them. At this point in U.S. history it is no longer unacceptable to puke hate speech over the public airwaves or in "mainstream" political gatherings:

mass unemployment + inflamed bigotry + paranoia = mob action       Eq (1)

What if the Gulf disaster, perhaps with help from a few hurricanes, makes large portions of the coast, including New Orleans, literally uninhabitable both owing to environmental impacts and the fully played-out impacts of a collapsed regional economy. Is it possible that tens of thousands of people --- or hundreds of thousands --- might be displaced? If so, maybe it's a good thing that we have a nice surplus of (decaying) housing stock; they all can move to California, Vegas, and Florida (at least until the tarballs and dead seabirds reach the latter). And don't forget that if nothing else, the BP blowout will most certainly inflate energy prices. And also don't forget about the conversion of the U.S. banking system into a multi-level marketing plan, like Amway and Ponzi schemes.

Meanwhile, I don't understand, in any technical sense, the financial pathology afflicting the Eurozone or what China is doing to the world economy, but many reality-based people who are savvy to those kinds of things are scared about what they could do to us. North Korea and Israel have both done a great service to the cause of international instability over the past 2 weeks. Significantly, the one hot zone stresses the U.S. and China in a big way, and the other stresses the U.S. and its oil protectorates (and oil antagonists).

And no, Chauncey, the "free market" will not prevent a progressive collapse, or stop it once it begins. We don't have a user's manual or a helpdesk for this sort of thing. I've been writing about various aspects of this looming situation for several years as if each aspect is at least somewhat independent of the others. That's because I came to this point in history believing that a robust constitutional democracy and a consensus about the role of government provided all of the stability necessary to break big problems into smaller ones, and then solve them. But the black spew has got me worrying that there will be a much larger price to pay for the Reagan Revolution than crumbling infrastructure and a 3-decade white collar crime spree. It's an event that deeply stresses the economy, the environment, civic peace, and possibly geopolitics.

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* Although the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, also has been attributed --- supposedly conclusively --- to this phenomenon, I feel certain that future historians and forensic engineers (probably members of whatever superior civilization buries our own decadent one) will document something very much to the contrary.