The Site Formerly Known As TheRickGreene.com

I've moved this thing to Blogger, but you can still get there via therickgreene.com. All new posts will be at the new site. I don't really have anything at the new site yet, save for a disaster-themed banner I made, but in the meantime, here's Ray Price:

Here's more from Salon.com on the campaign of misinformation against Barack Obama. As I've speculated before, the writer points to an organized propaganda effort that employs mass emails and talk radio to "sow the seeds of doubt" in the mind of the incurious voter. One poll mentioned in the above-linked article, for example, found that 7 out of 12 independent Virginia voters believe that Obama is Muslim. A very effective rumor in some parts of the country; I've heard several people state that as if it were fact.

The Obama campaign has its own website devoted debunking these rumors. You can also find a page on Snopes.com that investigates frequent Obama email rumors.

To summarize:

Not Muslim

Not sworn in on Quran

Wife did not call anyone "whitey"

Will say pledge

Will salute flag

Not anti-Christ

I wish that I could claim credit for this clever subject heading, but props for this witty bit of word play goes to Jon Stewart (or one of his writers). Stewart defines "Baracknophobia" as "the irrational fear of hope" based on rumor "...in the form of the only email your grandmother has ever been able to successfully forward." Sound familiar?

My inbox has been inundated over the last few months with so much bullshit about Obama and other related themes, all in the name of derailing some sort of actual PROGRESS in this country. I think that I get targeted for these things by people who think that they're going to change my mind and help them stop what they perceive as the inevitable wave of BLACKNESS that would follow an Obama victory. I'm not kidding, either; racism in East Tennessee is as popular as ever. I've heard it coming from people who would never dare utter "the N word" and consider themselves "open-minded," but live in fear of becoming marginalized by what they perceive as a pro-black, pro-Muslim and anti-whitey agenda. Of course such a notion is utter tripe, brought to you by the same fear mongers that gave us Iraq and the Patriot Act, but even if such a person were to get elected, his or her radical agenda would never get past Congress and the Supreme Court. Haven't you figured out yet that the only radical ideas that make it to law come from the right?

I got one such email this morning railing against Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for allegedly supporting windfall taxes on stock market and retirement income. Not only was the email completely false, but it was also at least two years old. No surprise that the originator of said email was a wealthy family member nearing retirement age who regularly partakes in the mega-church loving, mega-car driving, mega-bomb dropping and mega-mistake making Kool-Aid of the fading Neocon vision.


Figure 1-A: The Neocon vision
So please, people, stop sending this crap! If your voting decision is based even partly on Internet dis-information, then do us all a favor and stay home this November! If you're looking to verify an email rumor, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Neil Boortz, et. al. ARE NOT reliable sources! The same people that start these false rumors work closely with all of these supposed "news" sources to assure that you hear it from several places, henceforth creating the illusion of verification. The Snopes.com website debunks most email rumors, but please don't stop there. Anyone going into this election thinking that the 3-second sound bites they hear on television while flipping channels during American Idol commercials will provide them with enough information to make an informed decision is gravely mistaken. Put down that Hardee's Thick Burger and educate yourselves, folks - anything less is downright UN-AMERICAN!

A few places with minimal spin (there is no true objectivity in journalism - just those that are more clever about cloaking their biases):

Public Agenda Online

Mother Jones Magazine

The Washington Spectator

Citizen Joe

God I miss the Replacements! I haven't really listened to them much in years, but I need to. They were one of my absolute favorites from 10th grade on, and I even caught them live twice. I was in a band in the late '80s that wanted to be as drunk as the Replacements, but we quickly discovered that extreme states of intoxication, though quite enjoyable, were not particularly conducive to maintaining an audience.

I particularly love the original lineup with Bob Stinson on guitar, as evidenced here in the first video, a 1986 live performance on a popular television show I shouldn't mention because they are prone to yanking shit off the Net. I believe they remain the only band to be permanently banned from appearing on the show. What an unholy drunken terror these guys were!



Here we have Mats v2.0, with Slim Dunlop replacing Bob Stinson. I remember staying glued to tube the night they appeared on the International Rock Awards in 1989, and true to form, they did not disappoint. The band must have been informed in advance that the network planned to bleep out the line "we're feeling good from the pills we took," as evidenced by a minor change in the refrain, from "it's too late to turn back" to "it's too late to take pills."



Some say U2 was the best band of the '80s, and others might argue R.E.M., but I say that in terms of pure rock and roll spirit, these guys ruled the decade.

Prince is a total tool for having his lawyers pull this video from YouTube. Thankfully there's still a few - dare I say it - "revolutionary" types like Radiohead that love giving the finger any chance they get. Prince and company really knock this one out of the park, despite what the YouTube pundits are saying.

What is it with the name "Walker" and the state of Texas? I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with oil. One thing is for sure, though: Chuck Norris has taken too many blows to the head, because his letter to Congress is one of the most misguided, misinformed attempts to get even more American money into the hands of BIG TEXAS OIL COMPANIES that I've ever seen (besides the Bush administration, that is). But here's a little secret: the "Beverly Hillbillies" was fiction; the only people in Tennessee that got rich from oil are named Haslam. Who would have guessed that Pilot Oil president Jim Haslam (father of Knoxville's mayor) has paired with up-for-re-election Tennessee Congressman John Duncan, Jr. to promote the idea of drilling the fuck out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge so by this time next year we're only paying $4.98 a gallon instead of $5. All in the name of "helping the working class," mind you. Such compassion for a multi-millionaire, wouldn't you say?

This whole ruse is really the brain-child of none other than Newt Gingrich, who has wisely employed Norris as his face man, since I'm guessing that Newt doesn't know any kick ass karate moves. So where's there's smoke, there's a fire, and where there's Gingrich, there's going to be a bunch of underhanded rich white guy shenanigans.

If you're the kind of person that requires a bit more than a celebrity endorsement to make an informed decision, how about starting with a few of those pesky fact things. I know, I know, it's un-American and all and you'll be UN-supporting the troops and hating on fetuses, and it's got numbers and graphs and all kinds of actual DATA that's not in the Bible and the guy that wrote it is probably a gay black environmentalist Muslim communist who hates whitey, but who are you going to believe? Chuck Norris? Really? What, are you missing Charlton Heston already?

Get a room, will ya?

Anyway, here's the gist of the above-linked article, just in case you can't read it right now because "The O'Reilly Factor" is coming on:

Desperate people do desperate things. As Americans become more desperate for oil, I expect that ANWR and offshore areas will be opened for oil development. It will be like burning the furniture to keep the house warm in mid-January. It will be a desperate move that won’t result in much.

I'm sure everyone knows by now that Tim Russert has died. That's really too bad; I always looked forward to "Meet the Press" on Sunday mornings, and Russert's journalistic integrity was up their with Bill Moyers, as far as I'm concerned.

I was flipping through the channels earlier and Fox News was interviewing one of their darlings (and one of the most dangerous men in the country), Bill Kristol. There is just something intrinsically wrong about a guy like Russert departing while a Bill Kristol remains alive and well, perpetuating his nefarious agenda beneath the cloak of "journalism." Reminds me of John Lennon's murder, in a way. Or maybe a Billy Joel song.

Apologies in advance to the mystery Flash Dancer if she ever stumbles upon this video; what can I say but "welcome to the 21st century!"



This clip (from the Knoxville Central High School talent show, circa 1985 or 1986) makes a compelling argument for letting the fads and fashions of the '80s remain in their rightful place: another chapter in that book called "What The Hell Were We Thinking?". Notice the spandex-clad hair metallers milling about behind the curtain. This is indeed pretty painful to watch, but maybe it will make you think twice about dusting off your parachute pants.

Bob Dylan on Barack Obama:

Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralizing. You can't expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor...But we've got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up...he's redefining what a politician is, so we'll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I'm hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to...you should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future.

"H" is once again the big thing on the club scene. Preparation H, that is.

Apparently, image conscious club goers are slathering their bodies with the topical hemorrhoid ointment in order to appear "ripped" by shrinking blood vessels and therefore emphasizing surrounding tissue.

So hurry now to a hot new club near you and enjoy the rare opportunity to have all your senses offended simultaneously; just don't forget the H.


A man ahead of his time.

The Politico says that McCain "blowout" is quite likely this November. Take it for what it's worth, but a contingency plan is always a good idea.

Alas, it won't matter if you're in the U.S., Canada or deep in the heart of Borneo if the Mayan prediction of a 2012 apocalypse is correct. And before you go dismissing their prediction as ancient hoodoo, you should know that NASA has confirmed that the earth will experience a reversal in magnetic polarity that year; Einstein, Nostradamus and others also predicted this shift, which some say might trigger massive floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, wiping out the human race.

Even if all the polarity shift does is force stereo speakers to move in reverse and make Stratocaster players everywhere sound like Mark Knopfler, there is another scenario not too difficult to imagine that could once again prove the accurately foresighted Mayans once again correct: McCain.

If elected, the year 2012 would mark the end of his first term. After four more years of retreaded Bush foreign policy and an attack before talk strategy, those wishing harm to the United States would be as pissed off as ever. Some folks in other countries believe that they'll be martyred if they die fighting the good cause against the U.S. "infidels" (I can't say I disagree with their dislike of our policies, but their methods are entirely whack). A group with this mentality wouldn't think twice about blowing this whole rock to bits with their newly acquired super nuclear weapons, bought with the money we give them every time we fill up our SUVs. Ironic decimation, indeed.

Pretty solid argument against McCain, huh? Want to live to see 2013? Obama's your man. Fear got Bush a second term, so why not give those fat elephants a taste of their own medicine?

When you last checked in, band #1 had just formed and had the inaugural "jam session." We moved our equipment (after experimenting with other practice environments) into the bass player's backyard shed, dubbed it "the studio" and hung up posters of Duran Duran and stuck a U2 "War" bumper sticker on one of the windows. Not that we were intent on aping the whole androgyny thing; one thing I can say for sure is that I have never put on a "rock and roll costume" (with the rare exception of hair-brained last minute goofs during periods of extreme intoxication before the show) like so many spandexed clowns were doing at the time. We just went with whatever we had on at the time, which for me has hardly varied since: Chuck Taylors, blue jeans, and a t-shirt covered with a flannel shirt - classic "stoner" regalia.

During the whole six month lifespan of this group, we wrote maybe 2-3 actual "songs," and they were pathetically bad. Though smoking reefer was a pre-rehearsal requisite, we knew nothing of crack during the this time in Knoxville; it was surely making its way from the west coast, but during a time when cable television was the quickest way news traveled, it often took 2-3 years for "trends" to filter out to Knoxville. I know this because we would at times venture into the housing projects where the dealers pedaled weed instead of cocaine - the powder was too expensive for people in the projects. We'd roll up, they'd see a carload of white teens, and suddenly we'd be surrounded by guys shouting "three for five!" and trying to under price one another. But that didn't stop the middle and upper class white folk at the time from going crazy with the powered shit, and our high school was even written up in the local paper for being a hotbed of "cocaine abuse." Kids wore mock t-shirts that said in Coca-Cola font "Coke Is It At Central High School." I'd already had my first go 'round with the stuff and hated it; couldn't pay me enough money to touch the shit even today. So in that spirit, the singer and myself (while waiting on the other two guys to arrive) penned our first stupid song, "Snow Job," a cliched story of some dude who moved to L.A. and got "strung out," even though we really didn't know what that meant. We were actually writing an anti-drug song, which to me today sounds completely ridiculous. Nancy Reagan and her bevy of D.C. Stepford Wives were slowly using their famous husbands to push through legislation to "protect our children from the dangers of drug abuse." Even though we were naively allowing ourselves to buy into the hysteria, we wouldn't have gotten the lyrics past Tipper Gore and the PMRC (assuming we actually put out records for an actual record label, in which case the PMRC's stickers would have given us instant cred and increased sales ten-fold). Yep folks, by that point the solar panels were off the White House, the idea of pot decriminalization was long-since scoffed away by the closeted scotch drinkers and cigar smokers in D.C., and American society was headlong into a rapid descent into a theocratic oligarchy of "concerned parents" and "conservative values" that leads to where we are today, squirming at the bottom of the trickle-down cesspool, scratching our heads and wondering why we've let the Bush family dictate the terms for 20 years, asses sore and wallets empty.

Prior to locating to "the studio," we tried practicing in our drummer's bedroom (we all live at home, being only 15/16). This was still January 1985, back when we actually received at least two good snows every winter. As horrible as we were, we were so determined to "rock" that even four inches of snow on the ground would not stop us. I walked to our bass player's house, about 3/4 mile away, in the snow, where we loaded our guitars and amps on a sled and pushed it another 1/2 mile or so to the drummer's place. Now that was dedication, but sadly, it was not enough to compensate for our naivety and lack of instrumental and songwriting chops.

We plugged away the rest of the winter and into the spring, until we declared our selves ready to premier our amazing musical prowess to our friends and classmates in a resourceful, yet ill-conceived, effort to put on our own "concert" by renting the local Optimist's Club clubhouse. This was going to be the event of the year, such an awesome spectacle that it would propel us from suburban anonymity to real live stardom. But alas, such expectations were beyond the realm of possibility at the time. Despite carefully typed itineraries on my Commodore 64 (printed out quite slowly on my dot-matrix printer), a real live "venue" and a rented Shure Vocal Master P.A. system, we only had about 20 minutes of material, enough time for the handful (maybe 10-12, max.) of friends to witness just how horrible we really were, and enough time for the cops to arrive. I went home that night crushed, and vowed never to play in any more stupid rock bands. But unbeknownst to me, forces were at work that would cause our little band to merge with a "rival" band with a wicked demonic name, and my skinny little ass would soon be where it wanted to be all along: on stage, playing rock music for pimps, hookers, drug dealers and winos at a real live bar.

Good for this U.S. Army Reservist, who did his four years in the U.S. Army and was honorably discharged to the Army Reserves. In high school, he was just the kind of kid recruiters were looking for, so they came calling when he hit 16 years old.

"I was from a poor, white family from the south, and I did badly in school," the now 24-year-old said.

"Badly," indeed.

But now that the Army wants to deploy him to Iraq, he's at least gotten a little wise to their schemes.

"I stand before you today with the strength and clarity and resolve to declare to the military, my government and the world that this soldier will not be deploying to Iraq," Chiroux said in the sun-filled rotunda of a congressional building in Washington.

"My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation... I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation," he said, as a dozen veterans of the five-year-old Iraq war looked on.

It's a continuing trend, I'm telling you, that you won't find even stuffed away with the obituaries in your local paper or on your local fear mongering news cast ("Can your infant's baby formula cause homosexuality? Find out tonight on SCARE 6!").

One reason this sort of thing doesn't make the mainstream news is the military's tight grip on outbound Internet communications from the soldiers themselves, says a former Army sergeant:

"Everyone who manages a blog, Facebook or Myspace out of Iraq has to register every video, picture, document of any event they do on mission," Kristopher Goldsmith told AFP after the hearing.

Goldmsith says that officials take "hard facts and slice them into small pieces to make them presentable to the secretary of state or the president -- and all with the intent of furthering the occupation of Iraq."

Add the notion of the embedded reporter, which allows the military to grant media access only in tightly-monitored situations, and the likes of people like Petraeus buttering up this big turd to make it more palatable, and precious little "real news" makes it through. But there are a few blogs and such that do escape military censorship, and many tell a story much different from the one we're getting here.

I got that same call a couple of times from military recruiters when I was about 16, too. The first time they called, I tried to politely tell them "no thanks," but the guy was hyped-up on some high-pitched rah-rah country and you can go to college too sales pitch. The next time he called, I told him I was a pot-smoking pacifist and he could go fuck himself. That did the trick; never heard another word from the government, at least not in the form of a military recruitment pitch.

I had a friend who took this one step further: he refused to sign up for selective service when he turned 18. It took until he was about 21 to get him to cave, sending a couple of plain-clothes G-Men that looked like the bad guys from "The Matrix" to his house. He signed up; it was that or go to jail. True story.

Today Pat Robertson criticized Bush's opposition to the majority of Congress in halting shipments of oil to the national reserves for "going against Biblical prophecy."

Seconds later, Robertson says of Bush:

"You have to ask yourself, what kind of blinders does he have on?"

My high school's 20th anniversary, originally scheduled I think for sometime this summer, has been canceled due to "lack of interest." This announcement came mere weeks after another announcement that "due to logistical issues," no alcoholic beverages will be served. Gee, I wonder if there's somehow a connection?

Prior to my first experience in a "real live rock and roll band," my typical daily activities consisted largely of healthy ritualistic teenage mating exercises performed at the brand spanking new mall, located just a 20 minute bicycle ride away. My partner in crime, who fancied himself a cross between Simon LeBon and one of those ESPN Sportscasters with the "biting wit," was a year a head of me in school, as was almost everyone else involved from here on out. Early into our mall days, he acquired a driver's license and apparent carte blanche with his Dad's new red Mustang. Combine goofy '80s outfits from the Merry Go Round, and we were IN (well, not "in" in the sense that it will later apply, but at least it meant a handful of bra at the movie theatre).

My partner was a "star athlete" in baseball, who would later to go on to play on college scholarship and get an offer from the Reds, but he "threw his arm out" (whatever that means) and was forced to become a local sportscaster in Buffalo, NY. We both played on the same team, which in my last year in any organized sports, won the "league championship." He was our star pitcher, and I had absolutely no aptitude for baseball whatsoever but the rules required that I had to be stuck out in left field (how appropriate) when the game was either easily in hand or un-winable, and inserted at the bottom of the batting rotation. Yes, even the pitcher whiffed less than me.

I had "jammed" with various other fledgling "metal musicians" on several occasions, and was always frustrated by the lack of talent, especially the drummers who worshiped Neal Peart and had the double-kick sets with 83 toms. Because of this, I wasn't so sure that I wanted to "jam" anymore, but I had decided that aside from my witty pal, that most jocks were really uninteresting and not my kind of people. What "my kind of people" might be, I didn't really know, but I would soon discover my niche for purposes of teenage assimilation. It is at this point where our once convergent paths would slowly stray as our ideas of recreation became increasingly divergent.

We usually walked home from school together (I guess Dad had the 'Stang during school hours), until one day (I had just turned 15) he said this "new kid" he met played drums and wanted to "jam" after school. I really, really did not want to go, but my pal (thinking of himself as the alluring front man type) was convinced that we MUST go and start a band. Yes, I was forced into rock and roll by PEER PRESSURE.

So we met up with this squirrelly little cat after class and proceeded to his house, about a mile away. During the walk, he produced something from his blue jean jacket pocket that I had heard about but never seen in real life: an actual JOINT of marijuana. Being that this was still before Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" hysteria, I was ill-equipped with the defense mechanisms to turn down that fateful first toke. My head was filled with pictures of strange looking substances that I had read about in library books ("Go Ask Alice" really creeped me out - I thought it was real), and it all seemed really scary, but I half-heartedly toked, anyway. Being that no one had instructed me how to actually smoke marijuana, I inhaled and quickly exhaled, producing no sort of effect that I can recall.


What? You mean I hold it in my LUNGS?

I don't recall how we got my guitar and amp to his house, but we did, along with another friend with a rented bass and amp who had taken ONE lesson from the guy that taught me guitar and was a former "big time jazz musician." We attempted to play Def Leppard covers (my idea) and U2 covers (drummer's idea), but the bass player was as useless as Stephen Hawking's sneakers (make "I just tasted a lemon" face now). "Just pedal an 'E'," I told him, and that was his purpose for the first couple of months: providing a vague low end rumble for my weedly weedly wee's and the drummer's surprisingly accurate sense of timing.

The next day, drummer asked singer at school: "Who was that guy wasting my pot?".

This upcoming series does not operate on the premise that I am of the belief that anyone actually cares about the who, whats and whens or that this is just so DAMNED FASCINATING that you must read it, but merely that I believe that much of it was so INCREDIBLY STUPID that it might cause some of you to laugh, or at least think "I did the very same thing once." Some of it may very well seem to employ "artistic license" or hyperbole, but I endeavor to keep that to a minimum; the "truth" (as contained in my sieve-like memory, already dramatized and revised via countless oral recitation of anecdotal fodder) is in most cases sufficient.

I realize that some of you will know who these characters are, and some of you are these characters, and for that reason, I am omitting names altogether: the big tall guy with long black hair becomes "bass player in band #2," and so on. And if I am critical of any of these characters' "musical skills," know that save for one person with NO TALENT (and whose feelings I will not spare in the least because he deserves it) and one whose current musical ambitions I am unaware of, they all progressed to be REALLY GOOD MUSICIANS. Mind you, this story begins 23 years ago, so I too was a tone-deaf, rhythmless plonker on the guitar who aspired to be that guy from Ratt, so if I tell how bad the first bass player sucked, you'll know that he REALLY sucked and I was only a few Mel Bay books ahead, but both of us are much better players today.



So with that bit of business aside, I shall ensue to type "humorous anecdotes" about my experience playing in various rock bands (I've already given you the country band, and their may be some serious "jazz" involved at one point), proceeding in an easily digestible chronological fashion. But for now, my four-fingered left-hand (due to horrible accident involving knife and onion) has had all it can stand. Stay tuned.

I made a venture yesterday into RETAIL LAND, you know the place, located at most or all of the four directional boundaries of your town's limits, where people go to buy ANYTHING THEY WANT from REALLY BIG CORPORATIONS located in the same traffic-congested area. In the '70s and '80s, we had the mall, and it was totally bitchen; now it's the "lifestyle center." Blech. I can't imagine going to one of those places now as a teenager with the intention of finding chicks to coerce into the back row of the movie theater. The circular layout of the mall structure was easily traversed; just repeat until some chick follows you to the theatre ("hey, I'll buy you some popcorn!"). The modern layout is just way too linear, plus it's all outdoors, where people circle the stores in their SUVs instead of on foot. Malls ensured potential gropery, regardless of climate, plus they were great exercise.

Anyway, the kid at the checkout was especially talkative. He talked about trying to get through Spanish before he graduated. I thought he meant college, but he said he was in high school, hoping to play college basketball on scholarship. At 5' 8 3/4", we stood nearly eye-to-eye.

"Fancy yourself a Spud Webb, do you?"

Blank stare.

"He was like 5'4" or something and could dunk a basketball; he played in the NBA."

"Oh. I can't dunk a basketball. But I want to be like Kobe Bryant."

I wonder what the basketball equivalent is for the teenage garage band guy who can't cut it on guitar and gets demoted to bass during a "band meeting?"

I think it's called "towel boy." Time to recalibrate career expectations, there sport.

I've played the guitar for about 25 or so years now, but I've never really payed much attention to country music, or at least not with a critical ear for song construction and chord progression. By "country," of course, I mean the stuff that was coming out of Nashville from the '50s through the '70s, before Mutt Lange made Shania Twain a sort of Def Leppard with fiddles and pedal steels singing about rural themes. I grew up with no choice but to hear 1970s country music whenever my parents listened to music in the car or at home; my Dad had long since lured my Mom away from her R&B, stuff like Sly and the Family Stone and Otis Redding that initially piqued my intense interest in music as a child. If your folks dig it, it can't be cool, right?

Musically, my only previous experience with country was as a member of a country/bluegrass ensemble __ years ago, comprised of fellow hospital employees. We played some old standards and had a great boogie woogie piano player, amazing pedal steel, geetar strummers and banjo pickers. I played the token rocker. Sometimes we added this gigantic orderly whose father was a country session drummer, so we were in pretty good shape unless he flaked out and we had to resort to the washboard. This old geezer named Silas who played mandolin had a homemade washboard, with holders for thimbles on which he had painted the essential keys: E, C, G, A and F; it was his idea of a joke. We did various hospital function type gigs, played standards, smiled a lot and got paid to skip out of work a few hours a day and rehearse on the clock. Sweet. And when things got really wild at the old dedication ceremony, they'd put me up front to do a Chuck Berry number. Wild. But I wish I would have taken the opportunity then to delve further into the actual craft of country music, instead of just getting by chordally and playing Keith Richards and Dickie Betts leads in a major key, my ideal then of "country guitar."

So in my first study today, about four songs into it, the whole secret of Nashville hit making laid out before my very eyes. Items submitted for study were as follows:

1. "Stand By Your Man" by Tammy Wynette

2. "Hello Darlin'" by Conway Twitty

3. "When You're Hot, You're Hot" by Jerry Reed

4. "Daddy Sang Bass" by Johnny Cash

5. "If We Can Make It Through December" by Merle Haggard


At the exact moment I first heard the chord progression to item five, that awesome F major to F minor change, with the C to Cmaj7 to C/G and back to F before turning it around with the G7, I felt that I had cracked the secret code to Nashville hit making, though I'm sure many of you already knew this - it was the first time that I had actually analyzed it. It goes:

"Will the Circle Be Unbroken," when played by top studio cats in a booming post-WWII Nashville recording industry who would rather be playing jazz but make serious bucks doing this, becomes a BIG TIME COUNTRY HIT when combined with lyrical themes based on the strife of country living. It was a familiar sound for people in the south who secretly tapped their foots to "race" records or perhaps owned a Benny Goodman record.

Or more succinctly, learned musicians added passing tones to simple chord progressions favored in certain country regions, and wrote great lyrics with great melodies that sounded even greater after drinking seven Miller High Lifes and playing a game or two of darts.


Special prize for first person to name all pictured individuals; I'm guessing you already know the first one.

Since I'm always taking the piss out of someone else, I'll give you a little dirt on myself. I'm feeling charitable today since the little old lady at the grocery store gave me good advice on a choice of Mother's Day plants. I almost felt like reciting that old Lloyd Christmas line:

Thanks. Hey, I guess they're right. Senior citizens, although slow and dangerous behind the wheel, can still serve a purpose. I'll be right back. Don't you go dying on me!

I actually bought one of those Target retro kitsch faux rock band shirts and paid $12.99 for it. Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, something about a gig in London in 1972 designed to look like it actually was handed down from your hippie uncle. I really wanted the AC/DC Highway To Hell t-shirt, but much to my amazement, only the smaller sizes were available; yes, middle-aged fat ass East Tennesseans do love their AC/DC, even if they have to sneak into the teen section. But I purchased the Floyd shirt, knowing full well that it was basically the SAME SHIRT that the son of '80s wuss-rocker Kenny Loggins was wearing the other night when I watched "The Soup," forever putting any cred this fashion shtick had left on the, ahem, highway to the danger zone. But I do think he won some sort of prize by defeating Olivia Newton-John's daughter in a high stakes sing-off. His name is Crosby.

Adorned with my tinted aviators and sideburns, I can now look like someone who only fell out of fashion THREE years ago instead of 20.


I'm confused; does that mean he's east side or west side?


Still got the old tagger on it.