My friend Fast Eddie and I saw Tim play once, at The Main Point, a tiny coffeehouse outside of Philadelphia on Lancaster Avenue. It was either in 1973 or 74, he was with a trio of musicians and I mostly remember the feeling of the performance more than any particulars. It was an unaffected melancholy; a genuine world-weariness that pervaded the show.
I have always loved Tim's voice, even though I find the son, Jeff, a second rate parody of the father (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, "Only someone with a heart of stone can listen to Jeff Buckley sing 'Hallelujah' without laughing."). It is his second, third and fourth LPs, Goodbye and Hello (1967), Happy Sad (1969) and Blue Afternoon (1969) that are my favorites, though I appreciate the later, more experimental, efforts.
What I think of as his best album wasn't released until fifteen years after his death in 1975 at the age of 28. Dream Letter: Live in London 1968 (1990) is a double live LP (yes, it was released on vinyl as well as CD) that manages to capture all his best qualities. It also has my favorite of his songs, "Morning Glory." There is a cover version that is on the very first Blood, Sweat and Tears album, Child Is Father to the Man(1968), their debut (the band founded and led by Al Kooper and not the one featuring vocalist David Clayton Thomas) and another of the "best records by anybody ever."
A wonderful song; this version from Late Night Line Up from the BBC has surfaced on Youtube and is as perfect as perfect gets. Enjoy.
Beck & Limbaugh. Tag team from hell. Getting rich by tearing down the American experiment, sodomizing the democracy, and generally spreading panic and misinformation to a nation of boobs.
Tarring and feathering seems so... I don't know... 18th Century. I mean, it's absolutely what would have happened to these nimrods back in the 1780s or so; put out of town on a rail as the Torries and loyalists they are. What is replacing the Divine Right of Kings with the doctrine of jusnaturalism (the natural rights of ALL people) if not the advent of democratic socialism?
And I'm not even sure where you can just go buy feathers today anyhow. But you know those Styrofoam packing peanuts?
You want a tea party-esque solution? I say we tar and peanuts these bastards!
Here's a link to an article titled "Tenant protection laws are onerous." By the title you may surmise that the laws are deemed "onerous" because they are very one-sided toward protecting the tenant. Those of us who lack the means to buy Parisian real estate might well title the same article "Tenant protection laws are pretty darn sweet."
The two elements of these laws that caught my attention are these: all agreements between landlord and tenant are for a minimum of three years (unless the tenant wishes a shorter lease), and it is impossible to remove a tenant - even for the non payment of rent - until the end of that term.
Let's review.
In a purely hypothetical example, let's say that my friends Mark, Greg and I were to draw straws and one of us were to rent an apartment in Paris. Something nice, maybe in the Marias, in the 3rd arrondissemont; not too far from the Picasso museum or this little Irish pub where the ex-pats hang out. We all pool our money to get the place rented, and then, well, see above.
Let's review.
At the end of the three years, we are (1) evicted and (2) next guy on the list rents a place and, voila*, three more years of life on whatever the French word for "dole" is.
Three guys, nine years for three months rent and some sort of deposit that, who knows, French law possibly says we still get back. In addition, since there will be periods when none of the three of us are visiting, we can rent the place out to tourists three to six months out of each year.
In 1969 Pharoah Sanders released his LP, Karma. About a year ago the blog Deadly Death: The Diening published a post on the album (including a download of the album that is still working). Their description of the album's centerpiece, "The Creator Has a Master Plan" reads:
"Creator" comes in at 32:47 and wastes not a single note. Opening with a virtual rush of sound, it then quiets down and drops a brief riff from A Love Supreme. The tune then works itself into a groove that would later be known as acid jazz, working with Eastern percussion and allowing the bass to float close to the front of the mix. This first section relies on a modal two-chord structure that keeps the tone bouncy and meditative. At eight minutes Leon Thomas begins a chant-like vocal that varies lines from the mantra "The creator has a master plan, peace and love for every man." The vocals drop and the third movement becomes an unrelenting Coltranesque blitz that tears the mellow mood apart, only to combine the angst and mellowness in the next movement and settle back into a reprise of the first fourteen minutes.
In April 1998 I assembled a group of musicians in a studio and recorded an afternoon's worth of improvisations that later became the album In The Summer Of The Mushroom Honey. In the late fall of that year I brought together another group of musicians, some who had played on the earlier session, for recordings that became the album Waters Of Life, an album that is still unissued. During those sessions I decided to try and record a version of "The Creator Has a Master Plan" in which the sax is replaced by an electric guitar, played by Portland Oregon-based jazz guitarist and teacher, Daniel Noland. I don't have a complete list of everyone who plays on the track, however, I know that Mark Cutsinger played drums, Vess Ruhtenberg played bass, Barry McCabe played acoustic piano and I did the vocals and played percussion. The track is not part of the finished Waters Of Life album and is sort of a musical Ronin, homeless, wandering the endless plains of cyberspace. Give a listen.
A couple years ago I spent some time setting up a My Space page which I later mostly abandoned after I started this blog. Sometime later I set up a Face Book page, but I quickly forgot my log on information and put it out of my mind. Occasionally I would try and access the page, but for some reason I could never get the "lost password" link to work. Finally, about a week ago, I managed to get back on and I found a mailbox full of messages.
The effect was disorienting.
The best way I can describe it is that it was like a scene from a science fiction film in which a group of people who were abducted by aliens thirty or forty years ago suddenly return, walking out of a mist into view. Or, perhaps it is the memories that, like rescued miners, stumble of the mine entrance, their hands shielding their eyes from the daylight.
With every name from the past I found, I would look at who their friends were and find more names that sounded familiar and I would follow those links. I began to look at the photo books of people I didn't know or only vaguely remembered and, after an hour or so of that, I clicked on another collection of photos and found the one above.
I was stunned.
The photograph was taken in 1973, in the basement of my parents' house in Northeast Philadelphia (Cottman & the Boulevard for anyone who knows Philadelphia). The paneling, ceiling tiles, that dartboard, all instantly recognizable. I'm standing at the left; next to me is my friend Cliff. It was Cliff who introduced me to Bruce Springsteen when, after I'd moved to Clarion PA to start college, he mailed me sheets of lyrics from the Asbury Park album that he'd copied out by hand. This photo was taken right around the time I went back to Philadelphia and the two of us drove over to New Jersey, to see the E-Street Band for the first time at a bar called Uncle Al's Earlton Lounge.
$1 cover charge and $1 beers.
Next to Cliff is David, one of my best friends from that time, being held by another person I can't quite remember. I have no idea who took the photo either. I am pretty sure, however, where I got the idea for the sideburns.
I am in awe of the past. I am in awe of the future. I am in awe of the present. The "internet" -- this seemingly infinite mass of information that has no mass -- seems like a connection to another dimension outside of the four we move through.
This is also, however, where understanding that 75% of all the people on Earth today have never used a telephone comes in handy too. It helps pull me back down here on Planet One where real things still really matter.
A home movie that shows Marilyn Monroe smoking a cigarette reportedly filled with marijuana was sold at auction for $275,000. The video, which shows Monroe relaxing and laughing with friends, was filmed about 50 years ago at a home in New Jersey. According to the Daily Mail, the person who made the film confirmed that the cigarette contained marijuana, saying: "I got it (the pot). It was mine. It was just passed around. It was not a party. It was just a get-together. You know, come over and hang out."
I'm not sure what it is about this photo, a screen capture from a silent 8mm film shot at a party over half a century ago, that I find so... comforting.
I think it is an echo of my early-1970s self; a fantasy in which I'm passing a joint from Marilyn to John and Paul, sitting in my living room of that small house on Liberty Street in Clarion, PA, Bonnie Raitt's Give It Up on the stereo. Rum and cokes all around.
Twenty-nine years ago today I was at a late-night poker game. A friendly penny ante game at my friend Steve's apartment. Steve lived above a garage on South Street in Clarion, PA. I lived in an apartment above a garage about a block away. We drank beer and played records and I'm sure I bitched and moaned about every card I was dealt. The game broke up about 2:30 and a half-hour later I got a call from Steve. He said his brother, who'd driven home to Fryburg after the game, called to tell him that he'd heard on the radio that John Lennon had been shot.
"He thinks he may have been killed."
This was back before the advent of 24 hour news channels. CNN had started that very year and wasn't on the cable system in that small town yet. I thought, I don't know what I thought; maybe "I hope not", and I went to bed. I woke up late the next morning and turned on the TV and on channel after channel I saw the kind of photo and film montage that can only mean that someone has died.
I was working at a small local record store and I remember being furious with the people who called to ask if their Beatles and Lennon LPs were worth a bunch of money now. One guy called one evening, not too long before I closed the store, and he just wanted to talk about it. Not about the killing, but about Lennon and about the Beatles and about our childhoods and our memories.
I remembered the very first time I'd heard the name "Beatles", sitting in my desk in class at the local Catholic grade school. The parish priest's voice boomed out of the PA system to tell us that, in no uncertain terms, would "beetle haircuts" be permitted. None of us had any idea what he was talking about and yet all of us suddenly wanted one. What we now know as "THE SIXTIES" might have started that very morning.
My favorite John Lennon memory goes a little past thirteen years before that poker game when my friend Bob and I came back from the shop across the street with the new Beatles 45; this was late-November 1967. I had a crappy record player in the basement of my parents house and we sat there, not even taking our coats off, and listened to "Hello, Goodbye", a decent enough I suppose Paul McCartney song (elevated by some fantastic drumming by Ringo) but possibly the single most undeserving A-side of a single ever, or at least so we concluded after flipping the little disc over and dropping the needle on "I Am the Walrus."
In November of 1967 I was fourteen and had only read the stories about LSD in Time, LIFE and Look magazines; now we found out what LSD sounded like. Hearing that song there in that basement was like the moment in The Wizard of Oz where everything shifts from black and white to technicolor (of course, so was hearing "Strawberry Fields Forever" for that matter).
That same year Rolling Stone Magazine appeared for the first time and Lennon graced the cover of issue #1.
Rolling Stone ceased to be relevant sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s, but I always thought that had Jann Wenner had far more class than he does he might have simply and quietly folded the magazine after their last great issue.
Of all the work the individual Beatles did after the dissolution of the band, there is only one moment that, in my opinion, manages to surpass the best of it. On John Lennon's first solo LP, the song "God." His vocal on the lines, "The dream is over... what can I say? The dream is over" is among the most sublime things I have ever heard.
There are a bunch of songs about John Lennon, but the one that I think stands by itself is Paul Simon's "Late Great Johnny Ace."
Stan Denski, passed away on May 20, 2025 and lived in Indianapolis, IN, with his wife of 44 years. He plays acoustic and electric 6 & 12-string guitars in various odd tunings (try CGCGCF) and has released four albums under the names Many Bright Things and In The Summer Of The Mushroom Honey and has produced and written liner notes for over 30 others, including all ten volumes of the Love, Peace & Poetry series. As a scholar he has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, and one book. He is comfortable in his own skin and very much happy in his neighborhood and in his life.
On the reason for blogging...
"It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir." - Henry Miller
I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world perhaps I can never achieve the last but that will be my attempt. I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song. ~Rainer Maria Rilke
“The current political situation is very muddled. People tend to confuse the quest for freedom with the embrace of capitalism. It seems doubtful that the joys of capitalism are enough to liberate a people. The bloody failure of socialism is on everybody’s lips, but no one sees capitalist globalization as a failure, in spite of the bloody inequalities that condition the market, and the populations who are excluded from it. The American Revolution failed long before the Soviet Revolution. Revolutionary situations and experiments are engendered by capitalism itself and show no signs of disappearing, unfortunately. Philosophy remains tied to a revolutionary becoming that has nothing to do with the history of revolutions.” - Gilles Deleuze “Two Regimes of Madness”, pg 379
"The point isn't the guitars, or jazz, or even music, but feeling more alive, more capable of compassion, more dedicated to beauty where it lives and love where it needs to go. " - Gary Keenan
