Vive La Difference!

I have always felt more attuned to the past. This affinity requires the legerdemain of avoiding nostalgia's deadfall. Looking back with rose-colored glasses leads to sentimentality and self-delusion. As humorist, Finley Peter Dunne said, "The past always looks better than it was. It's only pleasant because it isn't here."

Two unique characters from those thrilling days of yesteryear comprise the subject of my latest musing. Born in the ebbing of the 19th century and despite less than salubrious habits, they both lived into my lifetime.

Gambler, hustler and con man, Alvin Clarence Thomas, better known by the moniker, Titanic Thompson, spent his life making wagers, hustling golf and pool. The nickname arose after one of his bets. A by-stander asked, "Who is that guy?" The loser answered, "He's Titanic; he sinks everybody."

Natural athletic ability and extraordinary hand-eye coordination explained his skill at golf and pool. However, not all of his wagers were above board. Thompson would cheat and finagle to give himself
every advantage. My favorite one - days before he came into a town, he would move the sign giving the mileage to reach the city limits. When he got to town, he'd bet everyone he saw that the distance marker was incorrect. Of course he'd win. This would lead to more wagers and usually more losses for the locals.

The other subject is more familiar - Mae West. This dynamic female pushed the envelope of censorship, and in a era of male-domination controlled her life and career.  I first became aware of her through her movies. However, she didn't go to Hollywood until she was 40. By that time she had sang and danced on the New York stage and had written provocative, successful plays for almost 20 years.

The first play she wrote, directed and starred, was Sex. The play drew crowds, but got her arrested on vice charges. Her next play, Drag, focused on homosexuality, but the authorities closed it during rehearsals. She continued to write titillating works which thrilled audiences and upset the status quo. When asked if censorship bothered her, she laughed and said, "Not at all, it makes me money!"

On the set of her first film, Night after Night, she complained about her lines. The director let her improvise. That provided her first memorable movie quote. A hat-check girl says "Goodness what beautiful diamonds!" Mae's reponse, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie." George Raft, star of the movie commented that West stole that scene and everything else except the movie cameras.

She challenged discrimination on all fronts. West moved into a plush apartment building in Hollywood. Her paramour at that time was William "Gorilla" Jones, an African-American boxer. Management barred Negroes, not uncommon in the 1930s. Mae proceeded to buy the complex and remove the ban. She owned it and lived there until her death in 1980 at 87.

Some examples of Mae's prowess:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJS670okmZc

There is a shortage of true individuals like the aforementioned. Technology advances at warp speed, but uniqueness languishes. At times, I think we've transformed into a society of lemmings taking selfies of ourselves as we rush over the edge into oblivion. As ever - BB

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." ~Mark Twain

Nothing Lasts!

The original bus in the swamp at Kesey's Oregon farm

The intrepid band of Merry Pranksters left Ken Kesey's ranch at La Honda, CA on their continental trip to find a kool place on my 10th birthday, June 17, 1964.  This psychic, seismic wave triggered the tsunami which sweep across the world in the mid-to-late 60s. As Hunter Thompson said in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: "We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . ."

 The Pranksters realized that life is ephemeral, and the title of this musing is their motto,"Nothing Lasts!" That phrase has echoed in my head since I learned that my favorite, neighborhood dive bar, Leadbetters, had been sold. Rumors and gossip as to what will happen are rampant. Like a supernormal surfer, I will ride out this uncertain undulation accepting whatever may occur.

However, the memories and friends I have gleaned from the denizens of this den of drunkenness will never wane. I had not performed in public or almost 35 years. Leadbetters gave me the opportunity to once again tootle the masses with my ol' guitar. That in itself is incredible. More impactful is the embrace I have felt from the community of musicians this tavern attracted.

Being a musical autodidact, true players have always intimidated me. But,
 my fellow musicians at Leadbetters not only accepted and encouraged me, but corroborated in my endeavors. When Kristin added her harmonic vocals, the support was electrifying. Of course the support came with the offbeat, irreverent humor which hallmarks Leadbetters.  Once her voice was heard, others would invite her up to sing with them. Unrestrained jokes and jibes of stealing the best part of my act became de rigueur.

Eschewing auguries, what the future holds for this beloved, gritty, diamond-in-the-rough, musical oasis is uncertain. But with a certainty that seems archaic in the modern world, I affirm that while physically Leadbetters may not last, its essence is eternal. As ever - BB
"If you pour some music on whatever's wrong, it'll sure help out." - Levon Helm

Merry Christmas

My Friends I have been lax these past months. Much water has passed under the bridge, but I have thought of you often. I will begin anew with my musings and doggerel in 2015. For now, please enjoy this Walt Kelly, POGO classic. Have a very Merry Christmas and to all a good night. as ever BB

 

"But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight—

'Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!'" - Clement Clarke Moore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46u50qJY0GM

Another That Guy

Mayhaps your remember a post from days past about "that guy". I'm not only a fan of old movies, but an inveterate credits reader. Because of that, I know the names of a plethora of character actors. Few know know their names, but most know their faces.

Last night, I channel surfed onto Lawrence Tierney's first starring role in the movie, Dillinger. He went on to be a film noir stalwart in movies like, Born to Kill, Shakedown, The Hoodlum and the homicidal hitchhiker in The Devil Thumbs a Ride.  I wonder if John Waters would have written his latest book, Carsick, if he had seen this before sticking his thumb out in Baltimore heading to San Francisco.

 Normally, catching a movie with one of my "that guys" would not be impetus for a musing. But in the intro to the movie, Robert Osborne mentioned that Tierney got himself into as much trouble off-the-screen as his characters did on-the-screen.

The tough son of an Irish-American New York cop, Tierney enjoyed his libations, frequented seedy bars and didn't take any guff.  In the 40s and 50s, he was arrested numerous times for brawls. So much so, that his career suffered because studios didn't want the bad publicity that hounded him. This behavior continued well into his 50s, after his career had waned. In 1973 at 54, he was stabbed during a fight in a Manhattan bar. Two years later he was questioned by the New York police after a 24-year-old woman's apparent suicide. He told the cops he..."had just got there, and she just went out the window."

Intrigued, I began some research of my own. Amazingly, I found out that his career continued later in life. His look had changed with age. Despite being listed as Lawrence Tierney in the credits,  I never make the connection with the film noir actor. For the Tarantino fans, he is the master mind, Joe, who put the gang together in Reservoir Dogs. For Sienfeld fans, he played Elaine's father.

That is the kind of trivia that become encoded into my cerebral matter. As ever - BB

"All right ramblers, let's get rambling!" - Lawrence Tierney as Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs

Garage Sale

 My last blog entry was mid-March. This hiatus is due to a myriad of factors: some personal, some
family, some societal and some mental coalescing into a block of Brobdingnagian proportions. Left behind is a aggregation of snippets that never came to fruition.

I have collected them here, a literary garage sale so to speak. Okay, not an original idea, Ken Kesey

did the same thing in the early 70s with a collection of pieces he had previously written. As C.S. Lewis said, "...no man who worries about originality will ever by original..." Hopefully cleaning out the recesses of my mind's attic will allow for a complete thought to emanate into a complete blog.

So here is a collection of the starts and stops formed over the last few months.

Friends - over the years I have noticed that I put my friends in circles bounded by geography, time and circumstances: work friends, friends from childhood, college(s) there were several, fellow musicians, drinking buddies, etc. Like a Venn diagram some cross into other groups. What amazed me most about this realization was that I remembered what a Venn diagram was.

Music - reviewing my collection of music, I realize that I prefer the early works of most of the bands/musicians I enjoy. There's something about their music before they become popular that separates the early stuff from later work. I don't know if it's a rawness, a feeling of exploration, a naivete, but usually the initial stuff is my favorite.

 Contrarianism - I have always heard the different drummer ala Thoreau. In my family everyone hated the black jelly beans. They became my favorite. When arena rock bands ruled the airways, I listened exclusively to Chicago blues and be-bop jazz. Most guys' first date place is the movies. I'd take the mademoiselle du jour to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Invariably, they'd want to see the Impressionists. I'd feign confusion about where to go, though I knew the museum like the back of my hand, end up at the Abstract and Dada collections.

When I moved in with Kristin, she was curious about my music collection. I played for here my Sun Ra CDs. Her reaction was blunt. Weeks later, I turned her on to Booker T. & the MGs (who she was not familiar with - that's what you get for growing up in the 80s), Allen Toussaint and Professor Longhair.  Her look was priceless! "You had music like this and played that other stuff?" She's still
with me, so the antithetical attitude works...sometimes. - as ever BB

"Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic." - Lewis Carroll ( Dashiell Hammett quoted this bit by Tweedle-Dee when asked to name communists in Hollywood by the U.S. Senate)

The Sound of Philadelphia

This blog isn't about the song, TSOP, by MFSB, the Philadelphia International Records hit that became the theme song for Soul Train.
The original scope encompassed the rich musical history of the City of Brotherly Love. However that story proved too vast for a simple musing. So rather than an in-depth study of the many facets of the city's sound, I settled on three characters who represent to me the eclectic, exciting energy of the Philly music scene.  

 An unknown star in the city's musical constellation is Dennis Sandole. A guitarist, pianist and composition wizard, he did musical arrangements for MGM studios in Hollywood during the 30s and 40s. Moving back to South Philly in the late 40s, he taught theory and composition to such jazz luminaries as John Coltrane, Stanley Clarke and Michael Brecker. Dennis had the allure of an absent-minded professor, albeit one who enjoyed more liquor than was good for him.

I met Sandole in the 1970. He was teaching a friend of mine, Pat Mahon. Pat was in high school, but a guitar prodigy. He urged Pat to get a better guitar, and took him on a tour of Philadelphia pawn shops. The result was the 1957 Gibson ES-175 which I now own.

Through Sandole, I became aware of Rufus Harley. The southern exodus of the 40's brought Rufus and his family to North Philadelphia. He studied music taking up the sax and trumpet. Harley became fascinated with the bag pipes watching the Black Watch perform in JFK's funeral procession. He combed pawn shops until he found a set and taught himself how to play. 

In the 80s, I saw him several times at a little club in Cape May, NJ called The Shire. The first time I met him, we literally bumped into each other at the bar. I introduced myself and told him that Dennis Sandole turned me on to his music. A gracious gentleman, he sat with me during a break talking about music and Philly. He never failed to stop and say hello each time I saw him.

My favorite story of his was about living in the Germantown section of town working on his bagpipe riffs late into the evening. Inevitably, someone called the cops. Rufus saw them coming and hid his instrument in the closet. The police asked if he'd been playing the bagpipes. He looked at them innocently and asked, "Do I look Irish to you?" They left.  I still remember his sheepish grin while telling that story.

Walking up 9th street through the Italian Market you'll
find an unassuming bookstore. On the outside wall is a small plaque commemorating local punk music legend, Mikey Wild.

He performed solo and fronted the bands, Hard Ons and The Magic Lantern. His songs included I Was A Punk Before You Were A Punk, Punk and  I Hate New York.  Branded mentally handicapped as a child, Wild became an icon in Philadelphia's underground music scene. You could find him hanging out on South Street or 9th Street selling his art and cassettes of his music. The cost varied from $2 to $5 to a slice of pizza.

These unique individuals are no longer with us. Their stories illustrate Philadelphia's fertile musical soil that nurtures unique talent. As ever - BB


"We're going hoppin'We're going hoppin' today/Where things are poppin/The Philadelphia way/We're gonna drop in/On all the music they play on the bandstand, bandstand" - Bandstand Boogie music 1954 by Les Elgart, lyrics 1975 by Barry Manilow

Day For A Daydream

While this blog has nothing to do with the Lovin' Spoonful, I cannot resist a musical trivia interlude. Riding high in popularity after several big hits, this jug band turned rock & roll superstars fell from counterculture grace in May 1966. Their Canadian guitar player was busted for pot outside of San Francisco. The police threatened to pull his green card. The record company applied pressure and he "dropped a dime" on his dealer. The underground press had a field day defiling them. I have read that this led to the group's demise. In reality, a change in the generation's musical taste and style was more to blame than that incident.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blog:
The intelligence and popularity of Albert Einstein transformed his last name into a synonym for genius. I have read much on Einstein, but recently focused on his proclivity for thought experiments. He would become fixated on an object or action triggering contemplation of mathematical equations. His theory of relativity which led to the space time continuum, began as a thought experiment riding on a bus watching the town clock recede in the distance.

 The phrase, thought experiment, struck a chord. As long as I remember, I have been an inveterate daydreamer. So, a daydream of space time dilation being relative to the velocity of the observer graduates to the prestige of a thought experiment. But, zoning out during Father Louis' Latin class thinking of battling evil forces on some faraway planet is absentminded woolgathering.  An elitist point of view n'est-ce pas?

Ever a language sleuth, I investigated this troubling term. First coined in Germany, Gedenkenexperiment,  is thinking through a hypothesis to a possible conclusion. It postulates a theory. Actual experimentation is required to make it a certainty. 

Einstein's bus ride, Newton's falling apple, Galileo's balls, (two things: 1- get your mind out of the gutter, 2 - despite popular belief, his dropping balls from the Leaning Tower was a thought experiment, not a physical one) all musings that reshaped our knowledge of the physical world in which we live. 

Somehow my musings have never succeeded to such stature. Who knows, in the future one of my daydreams will transform into the more grandiose status of thought experiment. Maybe the one in which I become an actual contributing member of the society transcending the world's petty problems generating peace and understanding among all peoples. Nah, make it the one where I ride a triceratops across the plains of Alpha Centauri leading an army of  minions against the forces of my arch enemy. As ever - BB

"I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering." - Steven Wright