I’ve never had a problem with drugs, only with policemen.

Keith Richards.

Jessica Pallington West has a book out, What Would Keith Richards Do? Daily Affirmations From a Rock and Roll Survivor, from whence the title gem came.

Amazon info but no free reads inside the book. Alas.

When United Declines Your Claim

... there's still something you can do. ...

Dave Carroll [Sons of Maxwell] - United Breaks Guitars



Update: Update

Billy Faier - The Five String Banjo

To those who purchased my CDs, my heartfelt thanks... I have decided to make my music available to everyone.

Billy Faier - The Five String Banjo

[via a tweet from @jessamyn, who adds BANJO!]

Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent ... a one hit wonder?

Susan Boyle aced Britain's Got Talent and the link to the video of her performance is flashing around the Web. The YouTube video was even mentioned in Jon Carroll's column this morning.

But can she really sing or was her rendition of I DREAMED A DREAM from Les Miserables a fluke?

Listen.





(Thanks, Annie Chernow!)

Update: ?? I guess! Guy Kawasaki Twitters about an analysis of Susan Boyle's viral video. http://adjix.com/c7ti

Holey moley!

What you can find on the Web. Knopfler. Clapton. EmmyLou.

I don't want to hear a love song. I got on this airplane just to fly.

Is there any wonder I love the Web? Muy muchas gracias, Tim Berners-Lee.

RIP, Miss Eartha.

YouTube - Eartha Kitt - C'est Si Bon (Live Kaskad 1962)

RIP, Miss Eartha. You gave a ton of pleasure to a zillion folks. Here's hoping you wind up with the folks you would want to spend the rest of eternity with.

Has it been that long?

I have a framed John Byrne Cooke photograph of Mimi Fariña on the wall to the right of the front door. She's standing at the top of the hill, at Union and Montgomery, goofing off with Debbie Green. I like the picture because it shows the waterfront behind them as it was back when the picture was taken, in 1966, and because it shows Mimi Fariña full of life.

It took me years after I first stumbled on the image on the Web to decide that his price was worth it and to contact Cooke and arrange to swop him $$$ for a print.

I'm still glad I did.

Depending on my mood, the photograph makes me smile, or tear up.

Same with DIAMONDS AND RUST.

The YouTube video is from 1975. Has it really been that long?

I guess it has.

yes I loved you dearly
and if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid

There's never been anything false about hope.

I watched this whenever I felt like it was all an impossible quest.



Thank you, will.i.am.

MTV MUSIC - I Want My MTV

MTV MUSIC - I Want My MTV

MTVmusic.com, a very clean, very simple, good looking site full of music videos and only music videos. Lots of older, classic stuff, too, like one of our favorites, Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing."

The site looks good and, in our limited testing, works great. And like Hulu, MTV also (smartly) lets you embed their videos on your blog, MySpace or Facebook profile, Tumblr, etc. (see below). It also has the requisite "social" functions like comments, rating up/down, etc.

[via Huffington Post]

My American Prayer and musical stops along the way

My American Prayer is a Web site to promote the pro-Obama Dave-Stewart-and-Seth-Dalton-directed video (with a cast of thousands, including Joan Baez, Whoopi Goldberg, and Barry Manilow) called My American Prayer.

Wandering away from there I found there's also the new "Yes We Can" video (a musical video with no connection to Will.i.am's classic) out from Maria Muldaur and Bonnie Raitt. Recorded at Studio D Recording in Sausalito.

Count down to November.

Joan Baez, Whoopi Goldberg, and Barry Manilow?!?!! Yipes!

Yay hooray! Squirrel Nut Zippers return to town

His nibs is over at his desk across from me, rummaging through online stuff. Turns out the US Air Guitar Regional Finals @ The Independent tonight are sold out, alas.

But THE SQUIRREL NUT ZIPPERS will be there on my bday! What an AWESOME coinkidink.

We're there.

Ego is not a dirty word

Retrieved a couple old Skyhooks cassettes this afternoon, including LIVING IN THE 70s.

I'll have to get CD versions if I want to listen to them at the computer or on the BO, I suppose. We don't have a cassette player here; I can only play the cassettes in the car.

Ego Is Not A Dirty Word

If I did not have an ego I would not be here tonight
If I did not have an ego I might not think that I was right
If you did not have an ego you might not care the way you dressed
If you did not have an ego you'd just be like the rest

Ego is not a dirty word
Ego is not a dirty word
Ego is not a dirty word
Don't you believe what you've seen or heard

If Jesus had an ego he'd still be alive today
And if Nixon had no ego he might not be in decay
If you did not have an ego you might not care too much who won
If I did not have an ego I might just use a gun

Ego is not a dirty word
Ego is not a dirty word
Ego is not a dirty word
Don't you believe what you've seen or heard

Some people keep their egos in a bottom drawer
A fridge full of Leonard Cohen
Have to get drunk just to walk out the door
Stay drunk to keep on goin'
So if you got an ego
You better keep it in good shape
Exercise it daily
And get it down on tape

[...]

If you've never heard Skyhooks, "Ego," "Horror Movie," and a couple other cuts are available at their MySpace page

I probably haven't listened to them for going on thirty years. Wish I could remember what made me decide I needed to rummage the cassettes out of the stash. Something that was going on online. ...

Vinyl Gallery: Vintage classical album cover graphics - a set on Flickr

Vinyl Gallery: Vintage classical album cover graphics - a set on Flickr

[via Laughing Squid]

Funeral music redux

I've always loved Jackson Browne's FOR A DANCER:

Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
But you'll never know

And for Skip I would've chosen Jackson Browne's A SONG FOR ADAM:

Though Adam was a friend of mine, I did not know him long
And when I stood myself beside him, I never though I was as strong
Still it seems he stopped his singing in the middle of his song
Well I'm not the one to say I know, but I'm hoping he was wrong

More Jackson Browne. Some Patsy Cline. Some Willie Nelson. Emmy Lou Harris. Sinatra. Ella. a bit of Jobim.

AGAINST THE WIND - Waylon & Johnny and Willie
LIFE'S RAILWAY TO HEAVEN - Patsy Cline or Johnny Cash
THIS OLD ROAD - Kristofferson
TEARS IN HEAVEN - Clapton
Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW - WONDERFUL WORLD medley

I don't know. So many. Warren Zevon. Keb Mo. Cisco Houston. Tony Bennett.

Am I gathering songs for a memorial service or songs to encapsulate my life?

I'll have to think on this. I'd count in Baez' AMAZING GRACE if I didn't have the memories already associated with it.

I'll have to think on this. Easier to choose the music than write the obit, eh?

Louise Ure - Muderati - Funeral Music

Louise Ure has a good blog post over at Murderati, the typepad blog that rotates posts by murder writers through the week.

Her post this Tuesday was about funeral music -- specifically, your funeral music. What music would you choose to play at your funeral?

When my cousin died, the family and her friends gathered at Pfeiffer Beach down in Big Sur. The music that played while her dad waded out into the surf to sprinkle ashes was Joan Baez singing Amazing Grace, a capella.

When Elizabeth died, her granddaughter sang Bette Midler's Wind Beneath My Wings, a capella:



Did you ever know that you're my hero,
and everything I would like to be?
I can fly higher than an eagle,
'cause you are the wind beneath my wings.

It might have appeared to go unnoticed,
but I've got it all here in my heart.
I want you to know I know the truth, of course I know it.
I would be nothing without you.

One of the songs Ure mentions is this one, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's medley of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and What a Wonderful World.



What is the music of your life, your soundtrack?

My answer later. We're off (on this friggin' hot afternoon -- up over 93dF upstairs) to the Waterfront Restaurant down by Pier 5 the Ferry Building for a Spanish wine tasting.

Later.

YouTube - IT'S OVER Roy Orbison

Amazing what's available on YouTube.

I'm a huge fan of Orbison. I will probably bounce from YouTube to YouTube to YouTube to ... until (not long from now) I decide I'm about ready to crash.

Claudette. Pretty Woman. Running Scared.



Blue Bayou




from Orbison to Patsy Cline


to Hank Williams



to ... well ... oddly enough there's nothing much on YouTube from Cisco Houston.

Joan Baez, however. ...



I bought a photograph of Mimi and Debbie Green, taken while Mimi lived on Alta. The two are goofing off at the corner of Union and Montgomery, with the piers and Bay as backdrop.

Thank you, John Cooke.

Cooke sold me a piece of his life. Man, I love the Web and the John Cookes of the world.

When I'm 64 ...

Talking with an old friend, well, exchanging e-mails and mentioned that I was feeling old.

His nibs and I'd had dinner a week or so ago with a friend who'd turned eighty in August. Eighty-year-old friend is looking good and, really, looks not that much different than he did when I met him thirty-two years ago. He's involved with crafting little technology whizbang solutions for folks at the VA hospital. He's a Maker. He hasn't slowed down much if any at all. He's just pretty darn cool.

I wrote to the e-mail friend, "I'm seven years older than he was when I first met him. Yikes, I'm feeling old."

Then I found this test: Are you a hippy?

which gave these stats on the folks who had taken the test:

54% of test takers are Male, while 46% are Female.
93% of test takers are under the age of forty, while 7% are over forty.
78% of test takers have hair shorter than 6", while 22% have hair that is longer.
7% of test takers were at Woodstock in 1969, while 93% were not.
[That in itself is astounding when you consider only 15% of the test takers were even =alive= in the 1960s. That means that ~50% of the people taking the test who were alive in the 1960s were at Woodstock. Is that even remotely possible?]
54% of test takers prefer John over George at 12% as their favorite Beatle.
15% of test takers were alive in the 1960's, while 85% were not.
21% of test takers are vegetarians, while 79% are not.
11% of test takers have lived in a commune, while 89% have not.
10% of test takers voted for Ronald Reagan, while 90% did not.
[They forgot to ask how many had even had an opportunity to vote for Ronald Reagan.]

The questions hit me with pangs of nostalgia: "Do you smell like patchouli?" "Do you own an incense burner?" "Do you have a brownie recipe with ingredients you can't find at the A&P?" "Do you think Bob Dylan has a good voice?"

Do you feel old?

Update> and the doorbell rings. By the time I get there, the doorbell ringer is gone, but there's an Amazon package under the doormat. "Thank you!" I call. "You're welcome," comes the reply from down the path. The package contained a couple books and Kristofferson's latest.

Earlier this month we'd been at the Fillmore for an AIM benefit. I was reminded again how much I like his words and his voice. A few days ago I put an order in and here it was. I put my new purchase into the CD player. First song was the title song, This Old Road.

Yeah, feeling old. And that's okay. Kristofferson, after all, is only ten years younger than our eighty-year-old friend and he's still kickin'.

Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main

 

Lovely sailboat out on the Bay this afternoon.

We're off to the Fillmore in a shake to see Kristofferson and Kitaro, Taj Mahal, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, San Francisco Taiko Dojo, Peter Coyote and Charlie Hill for the Longest Walk II. Maybe Buffy Saint-Marie, another writeup shows her on the lineup too and not Kitaro. Well, remains to be seen. I'm there for Kristofferson.

The sellingest album of all time ...

That can't be true, can it?

This article claims, "The Eagles Greatest Hits, 1971-1975 was released just four years after the band debuted. It has now sold more records than any album in history, including Thriller."

[via grapes2dot0, who was more interested in the story on Winslow, AZ, still cadging drinks thirty-five years later off their one brief bit of fame in 1972.]

For K and for those second cousins of mine who wear big buckles

Wandering from song to song in YouTube, I came across a couple anthems for a cowboy grandma and my second cousins who wear big buckles:


The Highwaymen: Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys

and


The Highwaymen: The Last Cowboy Song

'night.