Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Smoke Eaters- a journey in to the heart of the apocalypse

Acid Apocalypse- the Smoke Eaters


The Amersterdam based Smoke Eaters' remix videos began to appear on YouTube about a year ago. Since then they've released 9 videos all of which are notable for their adroit editing, skillful remixing, off kilter perperspective and their high concept ideas. To my knowledge they are still without a label. You can go to Smoke Eater's YouTube homepage if you want to hear more of their remixes.

Acid Apocalypse weaves film clips and spoken voice samples from Francis Ford Coppola's grounbreaking film Apocalypse Now to shape an ornate dance tempo remix of the Door's epic musical freakout,The End. The End was also the acid drenched musical backdrop to Francis Ford Coppola's surrealist storyboard for his Vietnam film saga Apocalypse Now. The End will remain married forever to Apocalypse Now in the minds of both Doors and Francis Ford Coppola fans.

The end product of the Smoke Eater's endeavor is an impressionistic rendering of Coppola's storyboard. For the musical component the Smoke Eaters use a revved up. tripped out dancebeat remix of The End. For those Doors fans who think 128 bpm dance remix of a Doors classic like The End is a profane act of blasphemy against the Lizard King, listen to the music in the video. The high velocity dance tempo works in a way I never thought it would have.

Coppola wrote the script of Apocalypse Now using Joseph Conrad's dark and allegorical novella of colonialism in the Belgian Congo The Heart of Darkness as a conceptual template.

There are a few talented people that excel in sound mixing, and an equally few talented people that excel in video editing, however it's rare to watch a video where the aural content of the music is seamlessly connected to the visual content of the video. Acid Apocaplyse is typical of the Smoke Eaters post-modern, deconstructive methodology of remixing music and editing video.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Musical Profile

Bob Brozman: Blues Master with a Real PhD in Blues


Bob and his truckload of vintage guitars. The guitars are worth 20 times the blue book value of the truck.

I first heard Bob Brozman play guitar in at Duff's a popular eating and drinking establishment in the Central West End of St. Louis in the mid-Seventies. At the time I was just out of high school, and attempting to eke out a living playing blues guitar in the old fashioned style of 1930s players like Blind Willie McTell, Furry Lewis and Rev. Gary Davis. I had a weekly Saturday night gig at a St. Louis bar, Cafe Louis, in the warehouse district on Laclede's Landing. It was all very romantic to me... I was just out of high school and playing the blues in a smoke filled juke joint at the edge of the Mississippi River like so many of my old blues heroes once did.

One night I sauntered in to Duff's and just by happenstance heard Bob Brozman playing guitar in the middle of one of his sets. I had never heard of or had seen him before that night, but by the end of Bob's set at Duff's, I was making a major life decision because of him.

Hearing Bob play changed my life because after hearing him play guitar, I decided to give up my aspirations as a guitarist. The jig was up and I realized if I played guitar the next five decades of my life, I'd never play 1/10th as well as Bob. It was a sound decision on my part because in hindsight, I lacked the disipline, dedication and talent to ever play guitar as well as Bob. So that entirely random encounter at Duff's rescued me from spending the next five years on an ill conceived trek to a career dead-end.

Shortly after that night, I quit my weekly gig at Cafe Louis but I had one final gig commitment that I had to honor: a headline performance at Tower Grove Park to benefit the Cesar Chavez's fledgling migrant farmworker organization, the United Farmworker's Union. I wasn't about to stiff a benefit gig to raise money for Cesar Chavez's noble La Causa.

I got this idea to invite Bob to be the headliner at the UFW benefit concert and I'd be his opening act. To my surprise, Bob's enthusiasm for playing the gig was unconditional, even if there wasn't any pay involved. At the benefit, I played my set and then Bob came on and did exactly what I knew he'd do...blow me off the stage. I figured if I was going out and at the end of my music career, I might as well go out at the top, playing on same bill as a great player like Bob.

Bob was awarded a PhD in Blues from Washington Univeristy in St. Louis. I'm not pulling your leg on this....Bob designed his own unique curriculum for a PhD in Blues in his self directed doctorate program in music at Washington University. I think Bob liked the idea of billing himself as the Doctor of the Blues and having the appropriate academic credentials to do so.

Later on, Bob told me about an extraordinary aspect of his own musical development as a child. Bob's uncle, Barney Josephson, was a prominent club owner who ran the legendary Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, one of the first places in New York, or anywhere, where black and white musicians played on-stage together.

I learned a lot from my casual and passing aquaintance with Bob Brozman. The few times we had a chance to talk, all our conversations were limited to blues trivia, antecdotes about the various old blues masters we each had met, and blues playing techniques. It was the kind of subject matter that only the geekiest of music fans would find entertaining.

A year or so after my first encounter with Bob Brozman at Duffs, I packed my bags and headed out to the East Coast to obtain an undergrad degree in critical theory at University of Massachusetts.

During the intervening years, I never heard anything about Bob. Bob Brozman's fate remained a mystery until one day in 1988 I came across a recently issued album by Bob called The Devil's Slide. at Tower Records in Boston. After developing a cult following from a decade of live performances, Bob's music career was starting to take off. Bob has since recorded 17 albums and two concert videos and traveled every corner of the globe from Europe, to Asia ,to Australia bringing the message of the blues to all. Paraphrasing the great Tom Waits, Bob was even big in Japan.

Over the years, Bob has expanded his musical oeuvre to include music with broader cross cultural focus. Bob was awarded best slide guitarist in the 2008 Accoustic Guitar magizine's Reader's Choice Awards. Follow the little blue underlined link to visit Bob Brozman's website

I selected three short clips from a guitar instruction video Bob once recorded to give you an idea of his incredible range as a guitarist. He's playing his instrument of choice, the National Steel resonator guitar which was an embedded resonator to amplify the sound of the guitar. In the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the development of electric guitar, the National Steel guitar was the favored instrument of many blues musicians because the chiming sound of the guitar's resonating speaker could be heard over loud din of a juke joint or noisy roadhouse.

Song #3 is essential straight-in-your-face Mississippi blues bottleneck in the style that Bob was playing when I first heard him in the Seventies:



Song #2 is a short demonstration of Bob's unique percussive style of playing. Bob once pointed out to me that nearly all of the great early blues guitarists pounded away at their guitars like the were perscussion instruments. Another great guitarist, John Fahey chided those guitarists who feared their guitar and played it delicately. Fahey's line was "stop playing your guitar like as sissy and hit it like you want to break it in two."



Song #1 is a demonstration Bob's newer culturally blended playing style where he puts it all together in a song called Down the Road. In this one short song you can hear elements of delta blues, ragtime, calypso and the earliest New Orleans 2nd line style of jazz. Down the Road an amazing tour de force of stylistic guitar playing

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Phil Ochs viewed as himself as an agit-prop musician not as an artistic commodity under the ownership of a music label

Phil Ochs spent his career living beneath the long shadow cast over the folk music scene by his friend Bob Dylan.

Ochs was closer to the style of a conventional old school folk singer than Dylan. Phil was viewed (for better or worse) as an ideological outlaw while Dylan was cultural icon.

Phil Ochs was in frontline of artists who were deeply involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements. He was the only big name performer at the first anti-Vietnam war protest at UC Berkeley in 1965. His left wing politics put him in the crosshairs of the House Committee on Un-American activities, the FBI's watch list of prominent communist sympathizers and eventually Phil even had the honor of making the Top 20 on the Nixon enemy list.

Dylan's early music was as socially powerful as Ochs but Dylan's involvement in the frontline struggles was that of a dabbler not an activist. I think Dylan's own skepticism of politics in general played a role in his limited participation in political protest.


Phil Ochs performing at the first anti-Vietnam rally in UC Berkeley in 1965.

By the time of the first antiwar protest at Berkeley in 1965, Dylan had abandoned topical and protest music and was reinventing himself as a countercultural zeitgeist who sent shock waves through staid Newport Folk Festival by plugging his guitar in to play a high decibel set of bluesy rock and roll backed by the members of the Paul Butterfield Band.

During his performance, the usually affable Pete Seeger was off-stage cursing Dylan and making a frantic effort to pull the plug on the set and put an end to this nonsense by Dylan, right then and there. Unfortunately Seeger was an old school, low-tech folk singer and he couldn't figure out which plug to pull. There were a lot of hard feelings between Dylan and his former folkie friends but Ochs didn't involve himself in the controversy and never commented on Dylan's radical transfiguration at Newport.

Two years later in 1967, Dylan was injured in motorcycle accident and observers were beginning to wonder what, if any, future lay ahead for his musical career. There were rumors that Dylan was suffering brain damage. Dylan had sequestered himself in a remote area of upstate New York and nobody, not even Albert Grossman, Dylan's normally long winded manager was commenting on the state of Dylan's physical or mental health.

It was that fleeting moment in 1967, it appeared that Phil might finally free himself from his unhip image as old school "hootenanny" folk singer and gain some crossover appeal to the Dylan's tuned-in audience of the rock underground. Pleasures of the Harbor was released during the Summer of Love in 1967 and was hailed as Phil's most ambitious and musically varied album by music critics. It was a concept album and a couple of songs contained orchestral arrangements. The album was consistently imbued with images of mortality, and it all came together on the abstract, electronic-tinged final track, "The Crucifixion."

This time around, it wasn't Dylan who robbed Phil of his moment in the sun, it was the Beatles, who released a Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band their most ambitious album to date, which like Och's Pleasures of the Harbor, was concept album with widely varied music and contained orchestral arrangements. Like Phil's finale song Crucifixion, the Beatle's album ended with A Day In Life a spectacular finale song that tied together the diverse array of the album's songs.

The fact that Pleasures of the Harbor and Sergeant Pepper's were created and released at nearly the same moment in 1967 is case study on the probability of synchronicity. Synchronicity is defined in Webster's as: the creation of the same new idea at causally disconnected places by two persons at approximately the same time.

Phil's attempt to reach a larger and younger audience with Pleasures of the Harbor was foiled because all eyes and ears were upon the Beatles new album in the summer of '67.

The Haight Ashbury counterculture had arrived and the 27 year old Ochs was regarded as a relic from a bygone era of coffee houses and folk music revivals. It's a shame because Phil Och's beautiful Pleasures of the Harbor ended up commercial failure and peaked at 167 on the Billboard Charts and to this day, Pleasures of the Harbor remains a criminally ignored musical masterpiece.

The first and only single from the album Outside of a Small Circle of Friends was promptly banned from airplay on the radio for the lyric "smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer". For all of their popularity with the counterculture, neither Dylan nor the Beatles would never dare to make an endorsement of marijuana use. Too much commerce was at stake, and breaking the establishment taboos could be a career ender for a band. John Lennon discovered as much after he made his "God" comment in 1966. Phil didn't care about commerce and fought his A&M label tooth and nail, to keep the controversial lines endorsing marijuana use in the song.


Small Circle was initially inspired by the New York murder of Kitty Genovese, in the previous year, in which several neighbors heard screaming but did not call the police, the tongue-in-cheek verses deal with the consistent inability of the general public to help their fellow man due to fear, ignorance, or just plain laziness.

In the end, the song makes a point about role apathy plays in larger social issues like poverty, government censorship, punitive drug laws and racial conflict. Over 40 years later, there isn't a single lyric or social malady commented upon by Phil in Circle of Friends that has become dated with time. The more that things change, the more things stay the same.



Lyrics: Outside a Small Circle of Friends
Look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But monopoly is so much fun, I’d hate to blow the game
And I’m sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

Riding down the highway, yes, my back is getting stiff
Thirteen cars are piled up, they're hanging on a cliff.
Maybe we should pull them back with our towing chain
But we gotta move and we might get sued and it looks like it's gonna rain
And I’m sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

Sweating in the ghetto with the colored and the poor
The rats have joined the babies who are sleeping on the floor
Now wouldn't it be a riot if they really blew their tops?
But they got too much already and besides we got the cops
And I’m sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

Oh there's a dirty paper using sex to make a sale
The supreme court was so upset, they sent him off to jail.

Maybe we should help the fiend and take away his fine. (*)
But we're busy reading playboy and the Sunday New York Times
And I’m sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends

Smoking marihuana is more fun than drinking beer,
But a friend of ours was captured and they gave him thirty years
Maybe we should raise our voices, ask somebody why
But demonstrations are a drag, besides we're much too high
And I’m sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Song of the Day


"The name is Billy Carter not Billy Corgan and it's screaming messiahs, not smashing pumpkins."

Smash the Marketplace- Screaming Blue Messiahs

1986 was a dismal year for me musically speaking. The three bands that meant the most to me from a cultural perspective, the Clash, Gang of Four and Mission of Burma had all disbanded in the course of the last two years. Roots reggae had fallen out of favor in Jamaica. And James Brown still couldn’t get on his good foot. (Good god! Bring me my cape and my sceptor, Maceo!)

The 1986 hit parade turned into a death march to the edge of a rancid landfill of musical garbage. The best of Music in 1986 was a pathetic grab bag of the most insipid, contrived and musically toxic performances ever presented for mass consumption by the brain-dead-and-now-on-life-supports music industry. Surfing the crest of musical stardom was Mr. Mister, Bruce Hornsby and the Range, Huey Lewis and the News, Falco, Peter Cetera, Survivor, Bananarama, Billy Ocean, Kenny Loggins, Lionel Ritchie, Wham! and INXS (whose name I thought was pronounced "inks" for a couple of years, to show you how tuned out I was from the hip MTV subculture). Listening to mainstream music and watching MTV back in '86 was as dangerous as sampling the free Kool-Aid in Jonestown, back in '78.

The one MOR performer that actually had some talent was Whitney Houston, but I couldn't escape the saturation bombing of the song I Will Always Love You. I Will Always Love You was stalking me everywhere and jackhammering itself into my brain until I got a migrane. All of my worst nightmares in 1986 had I Will Always Love You on the soundtrack

It got to the point where every time I heard Whitney singing those fateful opening lyrics: "If I should stay, I'd only be in your way..." I began to responding her lyric by yelling back at her "That’s right Whitney so get the f*ck outta here, girl" which some people (mostly teenaged girls) playing the song on their boom box took personally. Maybe I owe a sincere apology to all of those teenage girls I scared the hell out of in 1986. Ummm... maybe not.

I'm personally grateful that the boombox fad ended because the boom box gave blanket persmission to all tone deaf people to waterboard captive audiences with a tidal wave of abysmal music. I spent many a long subway ride in 1986 being hijacked by a boom box operator and taken on a hellish excursion to Satan’s palace of musical demenita. The horror...the horror of it all.

After that rant I can barely remember my selection for Song of the Day... Oh yeah... The Screaming Blue Messiahs... SBC's music was the only ray of light that got me through 1986. I felt like I had wasted the best decade of my prime years during the 12 months of 1986. The Screaming Blue Messiahs lifted me up from the lithium induced haze of a really bad year and gave me a swift kick in the ass. I want personally thank the Messiahs for intervening before I had a chance to pull off a Double Van Gogh Knife Procedure on my ears.

The one live performance I saw them was at was Spit in Boston. I was not disappointed. The Screaming Blue Messiahs were an angry, raging beast to behold in concert. Most SBM fans don't need read another commentary on Bill Carter's fiery guitar playing or his menacing stage personae, so I'll spare the agony. I will only say that Bill did better windmills that Pete Townsend.

A couple years after I saw them at Spit in '86, the Messiahs fell from the face of the earth never to be heard from again and their former label Elektra Records has never bothered to issue any of the Messiah's albums in CD format in the USA. Not even Rhino Records ever reissued any SBM albums. And Rhino wants to broker a reissue deal with nearly every band in history that nobody cared about.

Around four years I back began a collector's search a vinyl edition of SBM's first album Gun Shy. The album had been long absent from my personal collection, but I had also had a second reason for the search: Maybe be there was a story that could be told about the demise and afterlife of this great band. I checked with their former label Elektra who dropped them in 1990, no luck except I found out Elektra had long since sold the recording and publication rights to SBM’s music sold to the Warner Tamerline Publishing Group. I checked the legal filings of Warner Tamerline and found there was never any litigation filed by Warner Tameriline vs. Bill Carter or vice versa. All of the performance and songwriting credits were in Bill Carter's name but no legal filings by Carter or Warner Tramerline. So there was no pending litagation that prevented the reissue of SBM back catalog. So why weren't there any reissues of SBM's albums over the past 20 odd years?

Then one day out of the blue, an administrator at music forum owned by Brit music publication Mojo , mentioned in passing that the Screaming Blue Messiah's former manager was a forum member. He introduced me to a guy named Haile Milgrim and I did a background check on what Haile told me about himself, and I found out that this guy was the real thing. Milgrim had a credit on the SBM's first album as creative director for the band. When I met Haile, he was employed by the Grateful Dead organization as an associate producer in the ambitious project to release remastered edtions of the all of the Dead's studio albums.

Haile told me that the reason why the SBM's titles have never been re-issued is that when guitarist Bill Carter walked away from the band, he burned all of his bridges with the music industry and won't even discuss, much less sign off on any projects in which he was the performer or songwriter . And Bill Carter is primary performer and sole songwriter for nearly all of SBM's songs.

Haile told me that Bill pursues his second great passion in life: motorcycles, and works in a motorcycle repair shop somewhere in London. He mentioned the specific area of London but I didn't bother to write it down in my notes. According to Haile Milgrim, Bill Carter never looked back and has no regrets. There was one final incident in my SBM dossier that is worth relating to SBM fans.

About a year after I talked to Haile. a slightly mysterious event happened. Early in 2006 on the page of a MySpace member named "Screaming Bill Carter", three previously unreleased SBM songs were posted for download. Within a week the songs and the MySpace account had disappeared, never to return. Hmmmm.

Comments on the Song: Any band who plays a song called Smash the Market Place should be arrested for shamelessly pandering to my own vulgar Trotskyist taste in music. But hey... don't look at me, I'm the last person who would file a pandering complaint against the band. Instead I say this: The act of smashing the market place is a life affirming act! Smashing the market place is a blow against the empire. Smashing the market place is right up there rocking the casbah, demanding to be sedated or kickin' out the jams. Shall we pick up our bats and run riotously through streets smashing the market place?" Oh hell, yes!

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Flower Child

I throughly enjoyed this. That guy is an absolute wizard with that guitar. I have seen nothing like that before. He reminds me of a gypsy you would see wandering around India or something. I liked reading your experience and analysis over him too. I could definitely see where it would be hard to go back and play the guitar after hearing him play. I would seriously pay good money just to be able to do this last song.

I first read all you wrote about the man and song, then read the lyrics. When I actually watched the video, the tone and beat of the song completley surprised me. By the looks of the lyrics I was counting on a doom and gloom sounding song, but it was not at all! I didn't necessarily like the song but I found it interesting.

Gavin B.

What the videotape of Broz doesn't capture is the raucous, take-no-prisoners live performances of his early shows at Duffs. Bob would jump up and down like he was on a spring board when he played, and would frequently wander away from the stage and prowl through audience area and jump up on the customer's tables like an demented erotic dancer doing windmills on his National Steel guitar, and playing it between his legs and behind his head.

One night Bob led the entire audience inside Duff's out into the middle of Euclid Ave. and the crowd blocked traffic while it's members were square dancing, Deadhead twirling and doing the funky chicken with Bob the Pied Piper until the cops came and broke up the party. Bob had this talent for breaking down your inhabitions and challenging you to do something really crazy that you'd remember (fondly or painfully) for the rest of your life.

One more Broz story: One afternoon my girlfriend and I were walking in Forest Park when suddenly Bob Brozman came bursting out of the main gate of the St. Louis Zoo running like a sprinter and clutching the neck of his National Steel guitar in one hand. Bob was moving like a freight train, and as he flew past me Broz, said, "Can't talk right now" and off he ran.

About 15 seconds later a contingent of four or five visibly angry St. Louis police officers came bursting though the same gates of the zoo at breakneck speed. They were waving billy clubs and cursing. It was like a Keystone Cops comedy. There was no doubt that the "perp" they were chasing was Broz.

Suddenly Bob broke off the sidewalk and ran down a long hill and into a densly wooded area to elude the cops in hot persuit. Bob didn't need to worry, about 100 yards past the gate the cops were covered with sweat and out of breath.

I asked one of the more approachable cops what the deal was. He told me that skinny sumbitch with chrome guitar was always busking (ie..public singing for spare change) at the zoo without a permit and every time they tried to arrest him, he'd disobey their order to halt and go running off.

When he asked if I knew the identity of the culprit, I told the cop," I'd never seen that dude before in my entire life and I would have remembered a face like that."

My girlfriend and I returned to our walk but the second we both got out the earshot of the cop patrol, we both were doubled over in laughter for about five minutes.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

The Melugeon Connection:

Did Country and Western Music Originate in Africa?


An Indigenous Mulungeon family. Who are these people?

No sir, I haven't flipped my wig. Country music, the long standing music of choice for red necks, Klan members and anti-segregationists may have partial origins in the folkways of African music. Now just calm down there pal, and hear me out!

I'm currently working on a small research paper for the Gates Foundation to submit as part of a larger project on the ethno-cultural origins of traditional country and western music and I've found what appears to be an African connection at the root of country music. None of this is news to anthropologists specialize in Appalachian subcultures but the African connection to the Appalachian musical folkways has gone unnoticed by prominent American music historians (which I am not one of).

Most music historians agree that traditional country music as sung by Roy Acuff, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers originates within the musical folkways of Appalachia and leave it at that. Both Alan Lomax and Harry Smith (who were prominent music historians) correctly connected the origin of traditional country music to the folkways of Appalachian culture. Lomax and Smith comment extensively on the Scotch-Irish, welsh, English immigrant influence upon the music of Appalachia, but beyond the Celtic influence both historians ignore the influence of a second cultural group, the Melungeons (aka Melungian).

The region of Appalachia is at the tri-cornered region of three states: Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. The Melungeons are unique native American group of unknown origins who exist only in the Applicant region. Melungeons are technically Native American but not in the sense that most Americans understand "Indians" to be Native Americans. Melungeons have origins in a different region of the globe and have no resemblance of the members of the American Indian tribal nation.

Melungeons may have originated in the sub-Saharan region of Africa but since Melungeons were living in America when the colonists arrived, the mystery is how did they get here?

Descriptions of Melungeons vary widely from observer to observer, from "Middle Eastern" to "Native American" to "light-skinned African American."

There has been a heated debate among anthropologists about exactly who these Melungeons really are. A small minority of athropologist deny the exsistence of a culturally distinct group of Melungeon people and most of those people got their antropology degree from a Christian fundamentalist institution of higher learning, where scholars are taught to be racially color blind (racially color blind as defined by a policy of "close your eyes and all those uppity racial minorities will go away).

Fortunately I'm not an anthropologist so I don't have any political stake on the racial or ethnic classification of Melungeons. From pictures they look like gypsies who are a nomadic people with origins in the Arabic culture of North Africa and then migrated to Bohemian, Romanian and Carpathian regions of Eastern Europe and regions of Spain, Southern France.

So who are Melugeons and what does "Melungeon music" sound like? The word Melungeon means many things to many people. To the Arabic it means "Cursed Soul." To the French it means " Mixed." To the Scottish and Irish immigrants to the Appalachian Mountains, it meant not quite white.

Nobody really knows what authentic Melungeon music really sounds or may have sounded like because the Melungeon folkways may have been blended into the folkways of country music, bluegrass, and Appalachian music. American music historians still have yet explore the cultural trail that leads to authentic Melungeon music.

The earliest delta blues by Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson was unheard of and largely unknown to exist before music historians began taking field trips to document it's history. Had there not been a few 78 rpm records left from the 1920s and 1930s the delta blues may have disappeared completely from the face of the earth by 1950.

Part of my involvement in the Gates project will be a field trip to the tri-corner region of Appalachia to collect recordings of "authentic Melungeon music" which may or may not exist. There aren't any scratchy old 78 rpm recordings of long forgotten Melungeon stars that are laying around, to my knowledge. There is no Melungeon equivalent of Mississippi John Hurt.

It's a daunting task because Melungeons live deep in the woods in remote mountainous areas that for the most part are off the grid and even the Census Bureau doesn't know where to find many Melungeon households to enumerate in the census count. I'm forced to admit the prospect of traveling those regions alone conjures up visions of the movie Deliverance.

I won't blame you if you are skeptical about the validity of my Melungeon Connection theory. One of the board members at the Gates Foundations thought my initial proposal was a hoax, and that Malungeons came straight out of my creative imagination. If his allegations were true, I'd be getting a pretty good laugh (and a small monetary advance) at the expense of the Gates Foundation. For the sake of disclosure, I wouldn't be above perpetrating the very kind of hoax the Gates foundation board member accused me of, just to see if it was possible to fool an foundation advisory board with some wild fabricated story. Let me also add that I'd fess up to the truth if the proposal was awarded funding because jail is not a very nice place to be.



© Attributed free use without permissions is granted by author

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Song of the Day

As a rule I never select my all time favorite song for Song of the Day, but in the case of this song I'll make an exception. The video isn't Howard Jones, rather it's an artistic interpretation of New Song. And before you file that complaint to have me kicked out of the forum let me ask you a question. Do you have any idea of who your dealing with, pal?



The performers are on the video are a group of satirical artists who call themselves UberNooder and have developed a cult of YouTube followers with over-the-top yet playfully endearing tributes to long forgotten New Wave pop bands.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

ITEM: Jim Morrison As You've Never Seen Him Before

In 1964 before packing it in a moving to LA, Jim Morrison was a student and Florida State University. As part of a class project, Jim participated in this Leave It To Beaveresque public service announcement film, as an actor.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Engine

Ha - look at the way the lizard king opens his mail.
Head ****ed and hips swinging even as a teenage square.