Category: Music that doesn’t suck

The (Not-So) Great Pumpkin

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
The hummingbird feeders are going back in the closet for now.

The quail are laying low. The hummingbirds have flown south. Yet one bird remains, flying more or less daily at the elaborate altars to fascism that The Duck! City MAGgots construct in their front yards.

I prefer the actual birds to the gnarly old featherless talon I flip to the yard signs, banners, and flags of the FreeDummies as I bicycle past their fauxdobe compounds in the foothills. Simultaneously a departure from and a riff on the traditional Halloween decor from China via Walmart, I suppose — but I like my goblins a little less, y’know, real. Y’know?

Now and then it seems I’ve pedaled into some hideous Mike Judge-Tim Burton reboot of “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”

Linus, who considers himself an intellectual but gets his news and analysis from Facebook and NextDoor, pesters Pendleton about adding a Kevlar “Security Blanket” to its line. He wants one for his annual Halloween stint in the pumpkin patch, just in case another assassin decides to have a go at the Great Pumpkin, assuming he actually shows up.

Charlie Brown is an “independent” (unless you count Social Security and Medicare). It’s a convenient political fiction that means he hasn’t got the stones to put a “Pumpkin 2024” sign in his yard for fear of offending the Little Red-Haired Girl, who has long since married someone with a job and a future.

Not so Schroeder, the lone clone of an unrepentant Nazi who fled Germany as the Allies closed in; he plays “The Horst Wessel Song” on a toy piano while gazing soulfully at a framed, life-size, autographed photo of the Great Pumpkin cheating at squash.

Lucy is now a brittle bottle blonde who’s “had some work done” to keep her job as a screeching harridan for Fox News. These days she kicks balls rather than snatching them away from Charlie Brown.

Peppermint Patty (field-hockey coach) and Marcie (librarian) share a one-bedroom apartment with a dozen or so rescue cats and not nearly enough ventilation. But plenty of joy.

Pig-Pen is actually Steve Bannon (because of course he is). He had planned a live podcast from the big Halloween party until the FCI Danbury warden refused to honor his “Get Out of Jail Free” card from the Goldman Sachs’ edition of “Monopoly,” in which all properties are Park Place and only poor people go to jail.

And Snoopy is an undercover K-9 informing on all of them to the FBI.

Hilarity ensues. Or not.

Happily, we still have our bicycles. Pedal faster, I hear Pumpkin music!

Let’s go to the tape!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
Rock ’n’ roll! Or not.

As we backstroke across the bottomless sewer of the digital age, trying to keep our snouts above the stink, The New York Times throws us a 2,049-word lifeline on … the return of the cassette tape?

Holy hell. And I thought I was a retrogrouch. I don’t know whether to be tickled by this or go hang myself in the garage.

More than a few of us will recall the struggle to take our music along Back in the Day® when it was actually music, not the overproduced tuneless swill these crazy kids are drowning themselves in today.

Those tinny little transistor radios that fit in a pocket. Aftermarket FM radios to bring the local freeform set to whatever moldering shitheap you were driving after you got carpal tunnel trying to tune in KOMA — 50,000 watts at 1520 on your AM dial — while motoring through the Intermountain West on Coors, ditch weed, and fumes, coasting the downhills in neutral and praying for a gas station before the ground tilted back up again.

Eight-track-cartridge players, God help us all, bolted insecurely under the dash where evildoers could snatch them without getting all sweaty.

And then — the compact cassette.

I don’t remember whether my Japanese pickups of the Seventies and Eighties came with AM/FM/cassette packages, but if they didn’t, I certainly added that setup at my earliest possible opportunity. I was a driving fool, Maine to Spokane, Tucson to Tacoma, and a man had to have his traveling tunes.

Once a traveling companion jerked a Merle Haggard cassette out of my truck’s player and threw it out a window as we snorted that old white line across Utah. Something about turning 21 in prison doing life without parole doesn’t sound all that glamorous when you are basically a red-eyed, high-speed festival of felonies.

Who among us can’t recall spending a fun-filled hour teasing a tangle of cassette tape out of the in-dash player, then rewinding it past the wrinkled spot with a ballpoint pen?

“Goddamn it, I need this Creedence tape if I’m gonna make it across Nevada on US 50 without losing my fucking mind. …”

When the CD player came along I eventually “upgraded” to that like everybody else. Had to polish the discs more often than I ever did the truck, but the truck didn’t have to look all smooth and shiny to function.

These days when I hit the road I always carry a large box of CDs, but mostly scan the FM band for NPR affiliates, the way I once hunted for KOMA. I’m hoping to find some jazz, blues, classical, or the increasingly rare freeform set cobbled together by some kindred spirit.

But mostly what I get is pledge drives.

So I sing along with the voices in my head. That sure makes the miles fly by. And it isn’t hip or even illegal yet.

R.I.P., Kris Kristofferson

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

“I wouldn’t be doing any of it if it weren’t for writing,” he said, looking back on his career, in a 2006 interview with the online magazine Country Standard Time.

“I never would have gotten to make records if I didn’t write. I wouldn’t have gotten to tour without it. And I never would’ve been asked to act in a movie if I hadn’t been known as a writer.”

“Writer” was the occupation listed on Mr. Kristofferson’s passport.

A writer indeed. The Old Gray Lady has the obit.

Oh, yeah; all right

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
A musical gag from Dave Coverly.

OK, we all could use a good laugh these days — These days? Most days! — and I got one texted to me late last night by a couple of guitar-playing pals in California.

The cartoonist is Michigan’s own Dave Coverly, and you can catch his act at speedbump.com. Buy his book, prints, or original artwork while you’re there. He’s done a couple of these eye-chart gags and they’re all killer. Also, dogs and cats. What’s not to like?

Those of you who share my buddies’ fondness for pickin’ and grinnin’ — I’m looking at you, Pat O’B — should give this one a look-see. I haven’t tried it yet, but I did some research and Dave’s eye chart is 20/20.

• Update: I asked Dave (belatedly) for permission to reproduce his cartoon here, and he tells me that it’s a doctored version that musicians have been passing around for a while now. There’s another that uses notation from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. I should’ve picked up on it because the voice balloon and chart don’t match his other work. Derned Innertube pirates are everywhere, and it seems they’re all in a band.