Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Electric kool-aid hippie test

Posted: April 10, 2011 in Miscellaneous, music
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My hippie friends want to know why I don’t write about their music. The reason I don’t write about hippie music is quite simple really and that reason is that I have so far been unable to explain what it is.

To give you some idea of what I’m up against in this investigation, consider the following. Does hippie music include folksingers like John Prine and Bob Dylan? Does it include pop-country hybrids like The Byrds and Bob Dylan? Does it include wild-haired rockers like Mountain and Bob Dylan? Does it include people who were just passing through hippiedom, like The Beatles and Bob Dylan? Does it include psychedelic mind-trippers like The Electric Prunes and – no, I can’t make that one work.

Where do you file Quicksilver Messenger Service, except under Crud?

In Search of the Lost Chord
What then is this entry in the continuing annals of Run-DMSteve about? It’s certainly not about to make me a lot of money. What I intend to do is take you step-by-step through the rigorous scientific process by which I discovered that the long-sought definition of hippie music has once again dodged up a side street.

The first thing to do in any successful project is to sweep everything you don’t want to deal with under the rug. So I began by declaring that hippie music is music produced by bands that existed in the 1960s. This yielded a sold historic footing and liberated me from having to think about Phish or Blues Traveler.

To further winnow the field, I decided that hippie bands had to have staying power. If they’d played together for at least a decade or two, they were in. If their principal members had died in the early innings, they were out.

(If we posit the existence of a rock ’n’ roll heaven, I’m sure they enjoy musical performances by an adverbial intensifier of a band. But until we can download an alternate-universe app, we’ll never know what Janis, Jimi, Jim, and their peers might have accomplished. Though I can easily picture Jimi playing Wilson Pickett in The Commitments.)

I eliminated The Allman Brothers because Greg married Cher. Black Sabbath I eliminated just for being.

Finally, I considered the fans. A hippie band should come equipped with its own cult. Did our candidates have fans who routinely spent the summer following them around? Did these fans leave their jobs, if they had jobs, to go to 12 concerts in six cities in two weeks in one chartreuse microbus? Were they following their heroes around in 1970, 1990, and maybe even 2010?

There were only two bands I could think of that met these requirements: The Grateful Dead and The Moody Blues.

This is not my idea of a good time, but at least they’re better than Procul Harum.

Blues for Allah
To keep things simple, let’s refer to both bands in the past tense, even though 60% of the Moodies are still on the road and threatening to visit your hometown.

I confess that during an early adolescent period, when I was pretending to read Herman Hesse, The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed was the most profound musical document I knew. And at a later adolescent period, when I wore my hair down to my belt, The Dead’s American Beauty spoke of my yearning to get back to the land. An odd yearning, given that I’d grown up in suburbia.

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought of The Dead or The Moody Blues, except to switch stations when the local Classic Rock outlet wheels them out of the morgue. But once I had them under the electron microscope, I discovered some unexpected relationships:

Fig. 1: Sugar magnolia vs. white satin

  1. The Moody Blues experimented with classical music.
  2. The Grateful Dead experimented with disco.
  3. The Grateful Dead rode a train.
  4. The Moody Blues rode a see-saw.
  5. The Grateful Dead had trouble capturing their concert performance in the studio.
  6. The Moody Blues had trouble capturing their studio performance in concert.
  7. Band members left The Moody Blues by resigning.
  8. Band members left The Grateful Dead by dying.
  9. The Grateful Dead were fronted by a charismatic man.
  10. The Moody Blues were five guys with feathered hair.
  11. The Grateful Dead released Aoxomoxoa in 1969. The Moody Blues have nothing to match this, but Pink Floyd does: Ummagumma, released the same year. Which makes me wonder if The Dead and Floyd were actually the same gang of idiots.

Bummer. The only thing this list demonstrates is the astounding diversity of the hippie biomass. I’ll keep working on this problem, even though the budget compromise that has kept the government open has shut off my funding. Someday, I vow, the world will know what exactly hippie music is. Until then, tenere a autotrasporto (keep on truckin’)!

Golden Oldies vs. golden retrievers

Posted: March 21, 2011 in Miscellaneous, music
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Let’s give a big Run-DMSteve welcome to today’s contestants:

Golden Oldies: Radio programming.
Golden retrievers: Dogs.

Are you ready to rumble?

Golden Oldies
In 1966 my parents gave me my own radio, with a primitive earbud. They were sick of listening to my music on the family radio, which sat on the kitchen counter beside the bread box. Looking back, I can understand what Mom and Dad were up against. My musical sensibilities at the age of 11 were the equivalent of Lady Gaga and the Jonas Brothers. Who wants to listen to Herman’s Hermits and the tragic story of Mrs. Brown and her lovely daughter?

When I was 11, I certainly did, and when I got to see Herman’s Hermits in concert for a friend’s birthday I was thrilled. But before my 5th-grade colleagues and I could sing along to “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am,” we had to survive the opening act: The Who. (They weren’t famous yet, at least not on this side of the Atlantic.) What followed was, by the standards of that era, full-blown insane flying carnage. Fun!

Wherever you are today, Mrs. M., I’d like to thank you for not taking us home early, though I plainly remember your shock, particularly when the audience was hit by drum sticks and guitar shrapnel.

As the 1960s continued, The Beatles and The Who became more experimental and The Rolling Stones more savage. Other bands followed. Radio stations sprang up to play this music (the first “alternative” outlets). In the early 1970s I noticed that there were other stations, usually on the AM side, that were still playing Herman’s Hermits and similar bands. They didn’t seem aware of Sgt. Pepper’s or Tommy or Beggar’s Banquet. Their playlists stopped in the mid-’60s, and they included songs from a decade I knew nothing about: the 1950s, which in my mind meant crooners (Frank Sinatra) and cool jazz cats (John Coltrane).

As we moved into the 1980s and I learned more about the history of pop music I realized that Golden Oldies radio wasn’t just something I listened to when I didn’t like what was playing on the other stations. Golden Oldies was cultural propaganda, like Fonzi and Happy Days. All of the ’50s music these stations played was white-washed white pop. The only black artists I remember hearing* were Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Bo Diddley – and by the time we moved into the ’90s, Bo Diddley had disappeared and the other three were restricted to a song or two each.

What about all the other black R&B artists? What about rockabilly? What kind of country is this where we have to learn about our heritage from Led Zeppelin?

Today, in 2011, even that remnant of the 1950s is gone. The Golden Oldies songbook begins in the early ’60s with The Beach Boys and The Beatles. Jan & Dean and The Everly Brothers have vanished. Golden Oldies extends into the early 1980s now, and though blacks and women have been allowed into the club (no soul, no Golden Oldies), this format continues to perpetuate atrocities. Where else are you going to hear Chicago, The Dooby Brothers, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and Bread? Excuse me while I rinse my brain out.

* Not counting doo-wop. I’m not sure that doo-wop is music.

Golden retrievers
Golden retrievers love chasing tennis balls. They love standing around chewing tennis balls. They love you. They love whatever you’re doing. They would never ever rewrite musical history or suppress music created and performed by women, minorities, or gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered individuals. They wouldn’t make me listen to Chicago’s “Saturday in the Park.” And if I secretly played “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daugher,” they wouldn’t tell.

Winner: Golden retrievers. W00T! (And w00f!)

Thank you for the birds

Posted: March 6, 2011 in Miscellaneous, music
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Captain Frederick Kent Dezendorf, 1914-2011

My father-in-law passed away quietly in his sleep this week, in his house on the beach in Florida. When the morning sun rose, he didn’t. Capt. Dezendorf had stood his last watch. He was 96.

I hardly know where to begin with this guy. He was a seventh-generation son of Brooklyn. His family goes so far back in U.S. history that the British still owe them for several ships they swiped a couple hundred years ago. He went to sea not because of his ancestors, however, but because he loved to read. Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood and other sea stories set him on his life’s course.

Fred became an officer on the former Grace Line’s cruise ships, where he met the adventurous young woman, Ginny, who became his wife. She was a stewardess. It was 1940 and for their honeymoon they toured the West in a borrowed car.

These were the people who crushed the Nazis
When the U.S. entered World War II, Ginny drove an ambulance in New York City and Fred captained Liberty ships. He was 27. He crossed the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean in convoys on pitch-black nights that might suddenly be torn by explosions, sirens, and gunfire. In the morning one of the convoy’s ships would be gone. Or two or three or five. The survivors closed the gaps and kept sailing.

Fred was the captain of the Peter Minuit when they developed engine trouble and fell out of formation. A British destroyer kept them company. The Peter Minuit’s crew had to turn off the engines to work on them. As twilight came down their escort had to return to the convoy. Imagine yourself in the place of this young man, standing on your bridge, on your helpless, drifting ship, as the destroyer disappeared into the gloom and a lone voice called back, “Good luck, Petuh…” Sometime in the dark early hours, they got the engines running, and soon they rejoined their convoy. Just another day in the Merchant Marine.

It’s a Great Life
As the war ended, Fred became a pilot on the Panama Canal. He also worked for a time for a shipping company in Venezuela. In the 1950s, Fred moved his family back to New York and took a job as a deckhand for Moran Towing. By the time he left in 1964 he was their general manager.

After a few years as the harbor master in Woods Hole, Massachusetts (where he moonlighted as the driver of the Martha’s Vineyard ferry), he and a partner founded the pilotage at Port Canaveral, Florida. Fred had always loved to work, from the time he was a child helping to support his family by tying up packages at the A&P, and he continued as a pilot until he was 70 – climbing ladders up the sides of ships in the middle of the night to get to the bridge and bring the ship safely into port.

He always said that he’d been lucky. Early on he had found exactly what it was he wanted to do with his life.

In his 26 years of retirement, Fred twice drove across the country in his van with his two Norwegian elkhounds, once going all the way to Alaska. He wrote his life’s story, which he called It’s a Great Life. He loved bird-watching and he passed that love on to Special D, who once wrote to him to say, “Thank you for giving me the birds.” He enjoyed repeating that.

Heaven’s a little closer in a house by the sea
Fred stayed in his home right to the end, with nothing really wrong with him. He was just very old. Shipboard accidents couldn’t kill him. Hitler couldn’t kill him. Falling down a flight of stairs at 82, bashing his head open, and being found the next day by neighbors, with a blood pressure reading of zero over zero, couldn’t kill him. In his last years he slept more and more and mostly fell silent. But when he sat in his accustomed chair by the window with a view of the Atlantic, and someone put on some big band music, he still tapped his foot.

The day after his death, Moran’s Florida tugs flew their ensigns at half-mast – and Fred hadn’t worked for Moran in 46 years.

Fred was predeceased by his parents, his two brothers, and his wife. He is survived by one sister, five children, six grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, one cat, and a thousand stories of courage and resourcefulness that he always told with style and self-deprecating humor. No one loved a good story with a good laugh more than he did, even if the laugh was on him.

Fred’s ashes will be scattered at sea, as he had scattered Ginny’s. If you’re of a mind to mark the passing of this extraordinary man, please make a donation in his memory to your favorite library or to the American Merchant Marine Veterans Memorial Committee. Or give a dish of rum-raisin ice cream to your favorite dog.

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