Jorma Kaukonen

Zappa Plays Zappa

Camera Obscura

Where the fictionalist and music scribe drifts into cinema via a little bi-weekly column called Hidden Flick--24 editions and counting.

Best of 2008 - Bill Payne

I'll update this warehouse soon with over 20 features from 2008/09. The Bill Payne feature ranks near the top, and is posted here.

NOW PLAYING, to the right, also lists some recent work.

Closure

Still Life

Ever Onwards

Skeletons

Dungen

The Victor Disc

Headphones Jam

Julian Lage

Abandon Ship

Dark Was the Night

Phish - Hampton - 3/8/09

Phish - Hampton - 3/7/09

Phish - Hampton - 3/6/09

The Mantis Monologues - Part III - Joel Cummins

The Mantis Monologues - Part II - Brendan Bayliss

The Mantis Monologues - Part I - Jake Cinninger

Butch Trucks - Allman Brothers Band

PHISH AT THE MOTHERSHIP

Trey Anastasio, Jon Fishman, Mike Gordon, and Page McConnell
Hampton Coliseum
March 6, 7, 8, 2009

"Austin is not," they whispered, "like all the rest."

The streets were far narrower. That was the first thing I noticed. I was used to sixteen-lane super highways and streets which could fit two football fields from sidewalk to sidewalk in Texas. Everything is SUPERSIZED. Such is not the case in Austin. The beautiful little Texan city is an anomaly in a state which triggers very mixed feelings. Like most bleeding heart environmentally-mind liberals, I now almost permanently align Texas with the dreaded first family of American political crime, the Bush clan.

To go to Austin is to see what can be truly great about America in the form of its art, culture and people. The recent South by Southwest (as I hate acronyms due to the current ‘text message’ literary culture in which we dwell, I won’t mention those four letters—instead, I prefer to ramble about its pithy tongue-tied sound bite in a right snooty fashion) music festival was attended by what appears to be every American hipster on the planet and one wonders what exactly brought them to the city. Was it the heady music or the cool guest speakers or indie films or was it—as Jesse Jarnow sagely and in a bit of inspired hilarity field-recorded the audio activity—a gaggle of grackles making loud bird songs in the trees along the city streets? Jarnow’s comment about the birds being “pissed off locals,” what with all of the trendy media and music-and-film-loving tourists clogging the claustrophobic environs, was also quite inspired.

But we digress…and that perhaps, is Austin’s greatest legacy from the Asylum Street Spankers and their hit-and-miss vaudevillian post-modern shtick by way of New Orleans to the late, legendary guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan combining rock, big band music, blues and Austin, Texas swamp music with good ole Tennessee stomp-and-strut vibes. Austin is ALL about the sweet digression on a quiet back street and that’s enough sometimes in the overcrowded realm of one’s normal everyday activities. Slow the fuck down, dig? My late father grew up in Paris, Texas. They made a very cool film about that little place back in the American Century but alas, I think he needed a wee bit more of Austin to supplement his more conservative nature.

I remember how friendly the people of Austin were and how every show I’ve either seen in the city—the latest being Trey Anastasio’s best show of 2006 on Halloween at Stubb’s BBQ—or been told about was an all-time high. Case in point, the recent NYC two-date Ween run at Terminal 5 in Manhattan was apparently eclipsed by the “best show of the tour” also in Austin, and also at Stubb’s BBQ, according to my buddy, Tom.

Austin consistently delivers great music, film, theatre and has a refreshingly…O.K. I’ll say it…liberal slant on how one can live one’s life, who one can love and what one plans on doing to earn a living while bypassing the easy, corrupt road of Texas’ most infamous oil-drenched political family. It’s not so much “Don’t Mess With Texas,” anymore. The bumper sticker should read “Don’t Miss Austin.”

And I won’t miss the call of that whisper if I’m listening…sometime in the near future, on that quiet city street, outside the frames of homes that appear to have stood for two centuries and contain people with stories that reach back even further as one sees a slice of life that is equal parts Golden Americana and the sweet life that gives us all hope that this wild journey through the lyrical notes of our daily lives is somehow worth it.

"Chicago," he sang, "that line between what was and what really should be..."

There are loads of mistakes in this piece but, like rock 'n' roll, I like to leave the jagged edges exposed just to deepen the reality of the thought process--that idea that one is seeking something and doesn't quite know what it is but is willing to keep pushing hard with an honest goal and a pure heart.

Either that or I'm an undisciplined bastard embracing organized chaos, odd segues, and weird freakiness who also despises clean, Strunk & White writing that appears constipated--Jimmy Page's wicked tangents vs. Eric Clapton's reverential temperance.

“Chicago,” he sang, “that line between what was and what really should be…”
Randy Ray
Jambands.com
2008-02-26
Peaches En Randalia #24

2002>roadmap snapshot
Chicago is a good walking town—that is, when the place isn’t living up to its Windy City moniker. We take the medium-sized length trip down to the pier and notice about a dozen couples, single natives and wayward tourists—all those that wander are not lost—and the master shot p.o.v. looking back towards the city is spectacular and daunting. The streets seem like any that one would find in a metropolitan area but these streets hide some dark tales that even a Bogartish film noir would find too haunting to present. Indeed, Chicago is best viewed from the water as it all seems to fit into place. Many citizens originally arrived in America via the water and there is nothing quite like the view of a metropolis than from liquid’s edge as one wonders what could save this complex Chicago city from its historical fate as a place so corrupt that even Detroit shudders in the distance.

1928>historical precedence
I’m listening to Ramblin’ Thomas from his 1928 Chicago blues recordings and he’s setting the beaten-dog, devil-may-care stone work for the foundation that would become Robert Johnson. But then you knew that, right? Just like you knew that the Daleys—the same family that towered over Chicago for decades in corrupt, nepotistic infamy, the same family run by Mayor Richard J. Daley—a perversion of ‘elected’ power and a neutered dog posing as a human being—ordered the police to keep a tight rein on the party for the peeps, worker’s party factions, anti-fascists, peaceniks, free thinkers, hippies and freaky visitors to the Midwestern city for the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

And they did.

1968>HST
I returned [to Aspen] from Chicago and told everybody to vote for Nixon, as the surest means of seizing the Demo party from the hands of croakers like Daley and [Texas governor John B.] Connally…I got punched in the stomach by a cop’s billy club when I tried to cross the bridge from the Hilton to the band-shell in Grant Park.
- Fear and Loathing in America, September 10, 1968, Hunter S. Thompson

2008>M.O.
Umphrey’s McGee is on the final night of their three-night run at San Francisco’s…wait for it…legendary Fillmore—the house that Bill Graham built and the Grateful Dead dignified. The Chicago band has finally hit its stride during a heady weekend of numerous collaborations with local and visiting musicians—everyone from the opening OM Trio members to TLG’s Josh Clark to Lesh and Particle musician, Steve Molitz. If LEGACY was my 2007 theme then, certainly, COLLABORATION is the word for 2008. It will be a part of everything I write from Jan-Dec and, quite frankly, it is…uh…an odd word but I’ll use it, anyway…relieving to see Umphrey’s assume their jam throne and act like a band at the peak of their improvisational powers while sharing their stage with others.

1928>It’s good songs, stupid.
I’m so lonesome, lonesome, I don’t know what to do
If you didn’t have no good woman, you’d be lonesome, too
I’m goin’ up to country
Baby, I can’t tell you
- So Lonesome, Ramblin’ Thomas, Chicago, 1928

1968>“You bring the hate; I’ll bring the pizza.”
The “mass of white youths” failed to materialize in Chicago on October 8 [a little over a month after Chicago’s Democratic National Convention] for what was now known as “Four Days of Rage.” The two or three hundred people who showed up in Lincoln Park to “bring the war home” were almost all students and ex-students, equipped with helmets, goggles, cushioned jackets, and medical kits, armed with chains, pipes, and clubs, the men outfitted with jockstraps and cups. They had convinced themselves, and aimed to convince everyone else, that the movement was precisely the nightmare which the police had fabricated a year before.
- The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin

2002>Chicago>Russia>Chicago>San Francisco>Sis & Me
The Russian restaurant in Chicago was warm and inviting and we ate a plate of various seafood that was the size of an extra large pizza platter. We also drank about a dozen samples of Russian vodka and better than the shitty swill I had tried before with various Americanized brands; hence, my affiliation with whiskey instead of the clear serpentine liquid; although, a union that would eventually need to cease and desist. We, also, by a weird, unknown synchronicity, stayed at the Palmer House while in Chicago—the last place my mom had dinner before leaving her home and taking the train ride to the San Francisco Bay Area where my youngest sister and I were born, setting in motion our own tapestry which extended from the Windy City to the City by the Bay.

2008>Arriving somewhere…all my designs, simplified
I’m reading about Barack Obama and the Illinois senator is continuing to take the high road in the current volley of subtle attacks from the Clinton family two-pronged attack. Don’t get me wrong—I think Bill Clinton was one of the best presidents since FDR but I don’t quite think the same of Hillary Clinton, at least not compared to the Obama juggernaut. If one were to equate it to rock ‘n’ roll—and one should if one is writing for a site labeled Jambands.com—Obama is the Beatles of what could be America and Clinton is certainly the Stones of what it really is—America, a powerful force that offers equality to various people with their mixed bag of cultures and yet, one can’t quite get past that little unethical Native American dispersal issue. Meanwhile, Barack Obama is such a profound example of what America could be that one sees almost a little bit of Grateful Dead in him, regardless of Messers. Lesh, Weir and Hart’s endorsements. Huh? Obama represents an iconic figure who could unite a various and beleaguered band of misfits into rising above the collective mediocrity to become something much larger and good.

If that ain’t Chicago, as well, sitting in the middle ground between the terrible beauty and relevance of New York and the gargantuan splash and zither of El Lay, I don’t know what is, man. Chicago is a good walking town but can it be the town that isn’t known for the blues, bootleg whisky, corruption and the convention that damn near killed America? Can Obama seize the Demo party—something mentioned in Hunter S. Thompson’s September 10, 1968 letter to Allard K. Lowenstein—back from the sick tyrants that have so often polluted the waters of the Party for the People? This is all supposed to be about you and me, isn’t it? We matter, don’t we?

And, you know, we do—arriving somewhere, in between yesterday and tomorrow.

Third Time's a Charming Alarm

Ahhh...the home stretch on this here third novel. Things are swellishly grand and this cyber warehouse continues to expand with new features and rock crit bits. The Q&A is a tricky little beast but somehow it also helps inform my fiction. Indeedy, alas, not to get all Radiohead on dear diggers of truth but, that is saying a little too much. The completed work IS the message, right?

August 19, 2008...for whatever reason...ah, yes, ten years since I began the first novel...is the target date for the completion of the aforementioned Ghost novel. Until then, check the gear on the right and check often and thanks for stopping by. See ya on the Coast that Never Sleeps in a few.

P.S. Arriving somewhere but not here...did you ever imagine the last thing you'd hear as you faded out was a song?...all my designs, simplified...the toil of my plans, compromised...the toil of my dreams, sacrificed.
- le tree, porcupine