A few tidbits from Marriage Lines.That is why marriage is so much more interesting than divorce,
Because it’s the only known example of the happy meeting of the immovable object and the irresistible force.
So I hope husbands and wives will continue to debate and combat over everything debatable and combatable,
Because I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life, particularly if he has income and she is pattable.-=-=-=-=-=-Speaking of wisdom and wealth and grace —
As recently I have dared to —
There are lots of people compared to whom
I’d rather not be compared to.
There are people I ought to wish I was;
But under the circumstances,
I prefer to continue my life as me —
For nobody else has Francis-=-=-=-=-=-A prepared postition Man hankers for
Is parallel to and above the floor,
For thither retreating horizontally,
He evades the issues that charge him frontally.-=-=-=-=-=-From: They Won’t Believe On New Year’s Eve, That New Year’s Day Will Come What MayHow do I feel today? I feel as unfit as an unfiddle,
And it is the result of a certain turbulence in the mind and an uncertain burbulence in the middle.
All posts by Brad Whittington
I didn’t get anything to write this review
Note: Pursuant to FTC 16 CFR Part 255, (more human-friendly info here) I’m happy to tell you that nobody gave me whichever book I’m reviewing, or paid me anything to review it, nor do I have any affliliate links to bookseller websites where I can make money off this review. The plain fact is that I bought this thing myself (probably from Half Price Books or Amazon) and read it for no other reason that it sounded interesting. And then I blogged about it because I’m a complusive writer. I might keep the book, which is OK, since I paid for it, or I might take it to Half Price Books, or I might give it away. Or I might use it to prop up the short leg of my writing desk.Whatever I chose to do, it shouldn’t concern the FTC, so they should just move along. Nothing to see here, folks.
Mose Allison
From the Songs you won’t hear on the radio files:I don’t recall where I first heard Mose Allison. His voice won’t stop the presses, but he’s a killer keyboard plaer and the vibe rules all. Here are a few of my faves.Your Mind is on Vacation
Getting There
Quotes From Stuff I Like – Theroux
Hotel Honolulu, Paul Theroux
This guy is a great writer. You might have seen the Harrison Ford movie made from his book, Mosquito Coast. The movie was good. The book was better.
p. 4. A large square building with porches like pulled-out bureau drawers.
p. 6. “It’s not rocket surgery.”
p. 11. A boss’s comedy is always an employee’s hardship.
p. 25. On the beach everyone is a body.
p. 48. Games are the pastimes of men who cannot bear to be alone, who do not read.
p. 55. Fiction can be an epistle to the living, but more often the things we write, believing they matter, are letters to the dead.
p. 87. Guilt shows clearest on the faces of older people, whose skin is so full of detail.
p. 133. She was in the secrets keeping business, and I was a collector of secrets.
p. 166. She climbed on him and hugged him with all her bones, clinging like a little gecko on a big crumbling tree trunk.
p. 382. You’re a writer. Among other things, that’s a pathological condition.
Steve Earle
From the Songs you won’t hear on the radio files:
Steve Earle is from the nasal-mumblers school of vocalists and the hold-the-phone-damnation-thats-one-hella-good-song school of songwriting. If you haven’t listened to him before, do yourself and troll through YouTube and sample some stuff.
Here’s my favorite: Goodbye
Here’s Emmy Lou and Spyboy with a great cover.
Holy cow, looks like Steve has a Townes tribute album! Time to update my BoxedUp.com wish list.
Sex in books
I prefer to experience sex, not read about it. Or watch it in a movie. In my humble, but accurate, opinion, sex is not a spectator sport. Like breathing, eating and eliminating waste, it is something you do. And I don’t find much pleasure in watching people do those things, either.
YMMV.
Quotes From Stuff I Like – Gardner
I found some quotes from stuff I like jotted down in a notebook the other day and thought I’d share some of them with you. Here’s the first batch, a small, numbered, single-barrel batch.
On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner
p. 42. Teaching creative writing, one constantly hears students say of their work, “I am trying to show . . .” The error of this is obvious once it’s pointed out. Does the twenty- or twenty-five-year-old writer really have brilliant insights that the intelligent reading public (doctors, lawyers, professors, skilled machinists, business men) has never before heard or thought of? If the young novelist’s answer is an emphatic yes, he would do the world a favor by entering the ministry or the Communist party. If I belabor the point, I do so only because the effect of English literature courses is so often, for a certain kind of student, insidious.
p. 43. One of the great temptations of young writers is to believe that all the people in the subdivision in which he grew up were fools and hypocrites in need of blasting or instruction. As he matures, the writer will come to realize, with luck, that the people he scorned had important virtues, that they had better heads and hearts, than he knew. The desire to show people proper beliefs and attitudes is inimical to the noblest impulses of fiction.
Tom Waits
From the Songs you won’t hear on the radio files:I first saw Tom Waits on Saturday Night Live in 1977 doing Eggs and Sausage. Interesting, but not my vibe at the time. (Here’s a funky accapella version I’ve never heard before. With French subtitles, no less. Like, I dig it, man.)
The first time I was blown away by Waits was when I heard Tom Traubert’s Blues on the radio in the late 80s. The song was released in 1976, but it took a decade to get to me. Hey, I was busy.Our feature song from Waits for this issue is Hold On. The video leaves out my favorite verse.
God bless your crooked little heart / St. Louis got the best of me / I miss your broken china voice / How I wish you were still here with me / Well, you build it up and wreck it down / And you burn your mansions to the ground / When there’s nothing left to keep you here / When you’re falling behind in this big blue world / You got to hold on
To get Mr. Wait’s vibe, check out this live version of The Piano Has Been Drinking on Fernwood Tonight followed by some sardonic couch chat.
Waits has done his share of psycho videos and (in my humble but accurate opinion) completely unlistenable music, like half of the Bone Machine album, which won a Grammy, go figure. (I can’t find examples online of the truly horrific parts.) But his moody stuff, like Alice [lyrics] and Invitation to the Blues [lyrics] (with some nice banter and a side of Johnsburg, Illinois), is leviticusly deuteronomous, the coughing fan notwithstanding.
Andy Mazilli
From the Songs you won’t hear on the radio files:
Around 2003, when I was living in Honolulu, I went to the SF Bay area on business. I dragged Pierre, a co-worker from Montreal, to JJ’s Blues in Santa Clara to hear the moving guitar work of Laura Chavez, who was playing with the Lara Price band. [Note to self: Do a Songs You Won’t Hear On The Radio episode on Laura.]
Short discursive passage: I first heard Laura by chance. I bought a Baby Taylor at the Guitar Center across the street from JJ’s Blues and noticed a Texas band was playing that night. I came back. The warm-up band was Lara Price and Laura Chavez blew me away. Her work on Little Wing brought tears to my eyes. At that time she was 18, still in high school, and her parents were at the gig. I chatted with them and learned more about her background, teaching herself blues from SRV and other records when her guitar teacher wouldn’t teach her to play blues.
So I dragged Pierre to hear this guitar goddess. We got there in time for the open mike and a guy got up and played some of the most raw Hendrix-influenced guitar I’ve ever heard.
I talked to him between sets and learned his name was Andy Mazzilli. Later on he approached our table with a turquoise Mexican Stratocaster and tried to sell it to me for $200, saying he hadn’t eaten in a day or two. I didn’t, and still don’t, have any use for an electric guitar, and I told him flat out I wasn’t interested.
Pierre made interested noises. I reprimanded him, saying, “Look at this guy. He’s serious. He’s hungry. Don’t play with him. You’re not going to buy this guitar.” “I might.” “What, you going to put it in the overhead back to Canada, with no case?”
At this point Mazzilli cut in and said, “OK, how about a CD?” I said sure. He left and returned with an Office Depot CD he had burned himself on his computer. He asked my name and signed the CD itself with the phrase, “Thanks for your support.”
I listened to it in the rental while driving around town that week. According to the liner notes [a little photocopied square of paper tucked into the Magic Maz poster he folded into a CD holder] it was recorded in one day in a studio with a pickup band for $100. It sounds like it.
On the song Too Much Pollution, a string breaks in the guitar solo at 4:22. Maz tries another lick, but it’s thrown out of tune. He switches to creating a rhythm with deadened strings and wah-wah pedal for the rest of the song, scat singing after the lyrics to the end.
It also sounds like a guy who had mainlined SRV and Hendrix for decades. But it had a raw, free quality that resonated with me. Jail Farm is my favorite, although I cant find it online. Raw and sloppy, but personal and fluid. For me it really comes down to passion and authenticity and not to technique and polish. Passion trumps precision in my book.
I later learned he had played with such greats as John Popper, Joan Osborne, Greg Allman, and Kim Wilson. Check this quote from John Popper. “I think Andy Mazzilli might be the best guitarist I know in New York City.”
I was working on the Songs You Won’t Hear On The Radio series and thought of Mazzilli for the first time in years. I did some searching on YouTube and found some live recordings for your dining and dancing pleasure. I also discovered that Mazilli evidently died in 2007 at age 39.
RIP Maz. You are not forgotten.
Things That I Used To Do at JJ’s Blues
Notice the front door is right by the stage.
Guitar Payne at JJ’s Blues
Roto Rooter Good Time Christmas Band
From the Songs you won’t hear on the radio files:
I spent a lot of time trolling through cutout racks in the 70s. I discovered this gem in 1975. Took it a year to make it from LA to Fred, Texas.
I feel compelled to present what is likely the premier example of twentieth-century effluvia obscurata.
While there is no point in attempting to explain the inexplicable, perhaps a bit of contextualization is appropriate.
If you diced up the Marx Brothers (including Zeppo), marinated them overnight in the essential juices of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, sprinkled in the sifted ashes of Lawrence Welk and a full contingent of Borscht Belt vaudevillians, seared it all over a fire made from whatever remains of the remains of Jimi Hendrix, and then poured what was left into the twitterpated skulls of a gang of music-major hippies in the 1970s, well, you’d probably be arrested for corpse abuse, at the very least.
But you’d also end up with The Roto Rooter Good Time Christmas Band.*
The album featured an incredible trombone-laden, barbershop quartet version of Purple Haze that revolutionized my life. They closed with this version of Happy Trails that Van Halen later ripped off.
Noted for obliterating classics like Swan Lake (Swamp Lake) and Ode to Joy.