Category: Music that doesn’t suck

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.

Paint Your Wagon Black

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Worm Moon. Earworm optional.

I’m not even pretending to understand how my mind works (or doesn’t) anymore.

What sane person wakes after a restless sleep with the songs “Paint It Black” and “Wand’rin’ Star” conflated into a mental Spotify loop? Something like:

Do I know where Hell is?
Hell is in “hello”
I have to turn my head
Until my darkness goes

—”Paint Your Wagon Black,” Jagger, Richards, Lerner, Lowe & O’Grady

Just picture, if you dare, Mick Jagger and Lee Marvin croaking along in duet before your first cup of coffee, after a long Night of the Worm Moon. As earworms go this will not crack anyone’s Top 40. Not even in Hell.

Barking my shins on ancient pop-culture references as I stumble drowsily through my hoarder’s skull with the Voices cackling at my missteps — A 1966 Rolling Stones hit? A 1969 musical-comedy miss? And what’s all this about worms? — is hardly a recipe for refreshment.

Whose fingerprints are all over this sonic crime scene, anyway? Well, Clint Eastwood, whose various shoot-’em-ups I have seen far too many times and may have triggered (har har har) my Magnum fetish, is said to have called “Paint Your Wagon” “Cat Ballou II.” You may recall that the Jane Fonda flick “Cat Ballou” — which, like “Paint Your Wagon,” co-starred Lee Marvin — was filmed in part in the Wet Mountain Valley, near the old home place I call Weirdcliffe.

Then we have the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band cameo in “Paint Your Wagon.” Years before Herself and I set up shop outside Weirdcliffe I got to hang around backstage at a whole passel of NGDB shows throughout Colorado, thanks to some San Luis Valley bros with connection to the Nitty Grittys’ road manager.

Worms, you inquire? Night before last, I was revisiting the Don Marquis collection “The Lives and Times of Archy & Mehitabel,” in which Archy threatens to organize a revolutionary society of insects — The Worms Turnverein — to avenge themselves upon their human oppressors. The works of Marquis, along with Frank Herbert’s sandwormy “Dune,” and “The Short-Timers,” the book by Gustav Hasford that was the basis for “Full Metal Jacket” — whose closing credits roll to “Paint It Black” (also, note the Lee Marvin reference at the Hasford link) — are among the books I’ve read many more times than once.

Michael Herr, who worked with Hasford and director Stanley Kubrick on the “FMJ” screenplay, wrote another of my favorite books, “Dispatches,” which with “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque may be tied for the best book about war ever written. From the vantage point of someone who’s never been there and done that, anyway.

I know, I know. This is an awful lot of fuel for a mighty small fire. Happily, Herr, Hasford and Herbert never sat in with the Dirt Band, and Kubrick and Marquis never made a musical (“Paint Your Ornithopter?” “Cat & Roach Ballou?”) so let’s count our blessings. We already have more than enough to keep us awake at night, and most of it is nonfiction.