I drove to Nashville last Saturday on I-40 and I passed three semis the whole way into the downtown loop. Car traffic was also light. It was almost eerie. I found myself actually missing the usual barrage of vehicles speeding into the city. It was just a visible sign that the economic apocalypse is nigh.
Yesterday I got that the news that my salary would be cut by 10% due to the sluggish economy. It could be worse. It could get much worse. It probably will. I am a born pessimist. Expect the worst is my motto. That way if it doesn't happen you get a pleasant surprise and if it does; then so what. My economic class has always been upper lower to lower middle and a depression isn't likely to change that too much. I'll make do somehow.
Now if it gets so bad there is marching in the streets, riots, and roving marauders it really won't matter that my family doesn't have a flat screen television or a Nintendo Wii. What will matter is that we don't live in the city. Oddly though, I don't expect it to get that out of hand. I'm not that big of a pessimist.
Look for some more frequent posting again. Mostly old tales of my youth and music mayhem related to Murfreesboro and Nashville.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Austerity
I turned 42 yesterday and its welcome to austerity on a level I haven't seen since my childhood days of butter and bread sandwiches. It's enough to make me feel like a kid again. Happy Thanksgiving!
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Lame Duck Roast
"Honest to goodness, the bars weren't open this morning. They must have been voting for the president or something." - X
Good luck America, and stay tuned for tomorrow's post: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Good luck America, and stay tuned for tomorrow's post: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Shrub and Kara Hit The Haunts
I missed out on the chance to hit the haunts with Shrub and Kara this year, but through their website, Goblinhaus, and through their new video posts I feel like I'm there.
Denizens Of The Top Five
What is the only thing from my youth that I would love to get back besides the usual youthful physical attributes? I wish I had kept my Top Five lists. I only compiled my Top Five lists for a season or so when I was in 8th grade. I typed them out on an ancient Royal typewriter in the converted den of the house we lived in on Prindle Drive in Smyrna. I recall yellow shag carpet and dead flies scattered by the sliding glass door that led to the covered back patio of pebble stones. This room was oppressively hot during the day, so I didn’t use the room except late at night. This made it perfect for compiling my Top Five lists.
I would compose them once a week right after I arrived back home from an evening of roller skating in Murfreesboro at Jack’s. Roller skating was one of the major ways to socialize in an extracurricular way and for many of us this was a weekly ritual of delight. I’d get home around 10:30pm, since my parents never let me stay for the late skate which lasted until midnight, and I’d head for the den in an excited state to put the latest Top Five’s into posterity. What were the Top Five’s? It was quite simply a list of my favorite songs and girls of the week. Some weeks there might be no variation and then there might be a chaos of changes depending on events. I might meet a new girl at the roller skating rink or maybe at a pick up baseball game (that happened once) or perhaps a new song like “Another Bites The Dust” would come out and shoot straight to number one without ever being in the Top Five before. I took it as a serious task, but somewhere along the way the documents were lost. Maybe they’ll be found in an archaeological dig somehow preserved and the names of Pam Gilley, Christy Davenport, Jennifer Taylor, Lisa Sowell, and Sharon Bevel will be judged great since they were definite denizens of my 8th grade Top Five lists alongside such musical luminaries of the day as Pete Townshend, Queen, Kenny Loggins, AC-DC, and John Cougar.
I would compose them once a week right after I arrived back home from an evening of roller skating in Murfreesboro at Jack’s. Roller skating was one of the major ways to socialize in an extracurricular way and for many of us this was a weekly ritual of delight. I’d get home around 10:30pm, since my parents never let me stay for the late skate which lasted until midnight, and I’d head for the den in an excited state to put the latest Top Five’s into posterity. What were the Top Five’s? It was quite simply a list of my favorite songs and girls of the week. Some weeks there might be no variation and then there might be a chaos of changes depending on events. I might meet a new girl at the roller skating rink or maybe at a pick up baseball game (that happened once) or perhaps a new song like “Another Bites The Dust” would come out and shoot straight to number one without ever being in the Top Five before. I took it as a serious task, but somewhere along the way the documents were lost. Maybe they’ll be found in an archaeological dig somehow preserved and the names of Pam Gilley, Christy Davenport, Jennifer Taylor, Lisa Sowell, and Sharon Bevel will be judged great since they were definite denizens of my 8th grade Top Five lists alongside such musical luminaries of the day as Pete Townshend, Queen, Kenny Loggins, AC-DC, and John Cougar.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Living For The CTI
It was back in the mid-90's when I first started buying old CTI releases. They were abundant in the dollar bins of Phonoluxe and Great Escape and at the local Nashville thrift stores. They were not regarded highly by the jazz snobs I knew who felt that jazz had died the moment Miles Davis released Bitches Brew. They felt jazz had been corrupted by rock and roll and commercialism. But they held an allure for me and fellow Phonoluxe co-worker Chad for many reasons. Artists like Bob James, Grover Washington Jr., Patti Austin, and George Benson were the sound of radio jazz during the 70's so there was a nostalgic appeal. Then there was the fact that many of our most beloved rap records from the 80's had copiously sampled the CTI catalogue. Keep in mind this was before the internet had completely taken off so we had to rely on word of mouth to find out what records had the sweet samples that made the difference in an okay hip-hop record and a great one. Plus rap records from the 80's didn't have to list what they had sampled back then. So when we would crate dig the CTI releases were always high on our list and often we would hit paydirt with them. Another thing about the CTI releases was their cover art which seemed like a total break from the cover art of the jazz that came before. This can be attributed mostly to the incredible photographs of Pete Turner. I've sold most of the CTI albums I purchased from back then. They, along with lots of other records and compact discs, helped pay for a vacation to London and other bills over the years. But there's no shortage of CTI on the web. You can find CD reissues here. If you're not too concerned about the legality, there's also the blog The CTI Never Sleeps which is in the process of providing download links to the CTI and Kudu discography. So pay them a visit....for sampling purposes only.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Beard Time
Well, actually I almost always wear a beard. BUT with the world in tumult I think it's time I grew myself a prophetic beard.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Cue The Merle Haggard
Welcome to the upcoming financial collapse of America. When times get tough, I get to listening and playing music just as I've always done. This leads to small memory sparks that are soon zipping and booming like the 4th of July and I find that I've stopped worrying about what might come tomorrow. Hence this piece called Cue The Merle Haggard.
"are the good times really over....."
Just a little lyric snippet from a Merle Haggard tune I usually refer to as SNOWBALL headed to HELL. Actual title is "Are The Good Times Really Over (I Wish A Buck Was Still Silver)". It dates from that brief window right after we moved to the Jimmy C. Newman farm in the spring of 1982. We moved into a tiny ttailer with a kitchen floor tiled like a zebra. My parents bought me some shit kicker boots because the place was supposed to crawling with timber rattlesnakes. It was, but the boots weren't necessary. I wore flip-flops most of the time.
This was the 3rd big dislocation in just as many years and my identity was in complete teenage free fall. I had flourished when we moved to Smyrna for 8th grade. I had floundered after we moved back to Murfreesboro for 9th grade at Oakland High. It's a wonder I didn't kill myself or become a criminal during that year of purgatory. Now we had traveled to the outer reaches of Rutherford County so my father could manage the farm of a Grand Ole Opry star I had never even heard of before. Which meant yet another new school to attend in the Fall. I spent a few days exploring the huge farm and never felt so alone or adrift in my young life. I almost wrecked my bicycle the day I met the accordion player's son by the creek that ran beside the mile long road slash driveway.
He had yelled "hello" as I rode by. I quickly learned that his name was James, he was in 8th grade. his father played accordion in Newman's Cajun Country band, and that he lived just around the corner. Most important, I learned that he also liked to smoke cigarettes so we adjourned under the wooden bridge that ran over the creek right after a hairpin turn which made it easy to almost run big Impalas over the side if you weren't watching what you doing closely enough as I was to find out a few years later, but was also very convenient for sneaking smokes as long as the copperheads cooperated by staying under their rocks. Soon James introduced me to his older sister Paige, and a dude from down the highway named John. They were all Cajuns, but they referred to themselves as coonasses.
It was all so new and even sorta exciting. After just a few weeks around them I began talking like them subconsciously dropping their Cajun accent into my speech. I tried to hang out with them as often as possible, but soon after the novelty factor wore off on both sides it became very apparent that if our lives had been a Sesame Street song; I was the one of those things that didn't belong here. I loved the country, but I wasn't a country boy like James and John. Paige was cute and I thought I'd dig hanging around her, but her personality was ugly with a capital U. So now I was even more lost and adrift than before. The loneliest person isn't sitting by themselves. The loneliest person is always sitting in a room full of people feeling like they are invisible and powerless to change this.
This was how I felt when I was around the Cajun kids. Not only did I lack the requisite country boy skills, but I was an ethnic minority around them. They weren't above throwing in some French patois, pointing at me, and then laughing. If there was any kind of dispute it was always two, or three if Paige was around, against my one small voice. Knowing I would never become the buck knife toting redneck they seemed to aspire to be, I did the one thing I knew might lead to some common ground among us and perhaps lead to that first pleasant novel stage again. I started listening to country music radio only. Which is not as drastic as it appears. I might have preferred Kiss, but I did grow up watching Porter Wagoner and Hee Haw.
This experiment lasted maybe 2 to 3 months. It was a blur of mainly Alabama, Hank Williams Jr,. David Frizzell, and Sylvia at the time. Only two songs really stand out for me now. One was by Janie Fricke where she sings she's gonna love you till the cows come home. The cows never really came home at Jimmy's; they just sort of ambled around the acreage so I guess Janie would have have had her work cut out for her there. The other song was Merle Haggard's "Are The Good Times Really Over (I Wish A Buck Was Still Silver)" which had been released in 1981. I knew Merle from a greatest hits collection my father owned and he stood out from the cosmopolitan country flavors Nashville was shoving down everyone's ears.
It didn't take long to realize that an appreciation for country music wasn't going to make me visible to the Cajuns or to anybody else. It wasn't long till my Cajun friends sold me out to a bully and I would learn that I wasn't so invisible, but now wished I had been. I went back to the heavy metal and punk music I truly loved. I slowly made new friends at Riverdale High. I took advantage of knowing Jimmy C. Newman and attended countless Grand Ole Opry shows and ran around Opryland by myself for free until the park closed. I'd ride the Grizzly River Rampage with a raft full of strangers and somehow it was okay. We were all snowballs headed to hell, right.
"are the good times really over....."
Just a little lyric snippet from a Merle Haggard tune I usually refer to as SNOWBALL headed to HELL. Actual title is "Are The Good Times Really Over (I Wish A Buck Was Still Silver)". It dates from that brief window right after we moved to the Jimmy C. Newman farm in the spring of 1982. We moved into a tiny ttailer with a kitchen floor tiled like a zebra. My parents bought me some shit kicker boots because the place was supposed to crawling with timber rattlesnakes. It was, but the boots weren't necessary. I wore flip-flops most of the time.
This was the 3rd big dislocation in just as many years and my identity was in complete teenage free fall. I had flourished when we moved to Smyrna for 8th grade. I had floundered after we moved back to Murfreesboro for 9th grade at Oakland High. It's a wonder I didn't kill myself or become a criminal during that year of purgatory. Now we had traveled to the outer reaches of Rutherford County so my father could manage the farm of a Grand Ole Opry star I had never even heard of before. Which meant yet another new school to attend in the Fall. I spent a few days exploring the huge farm and never felt so alone or adrift in my young life. I almost wrecked my bicycle the day I met the accordion player's son by the creek that ran beside the mile long road slash driveway.
He had yelled "hello" as I rode by. I quickly learned that his name was James, he was in 8th grade. his father played accordion in Newman's Cajun Country band, and that he lived just around the corner. Most important, I learned that he also liked to smoke cigarettes so we adjourned under the wooden bridge that ran over the creek right after a hairpin turn which made it easy to almost run big Impalas over the side if you weren't watching what you doing closely enough as I was to find out a few years later, but was also very convenient for sneaking smokes as long as the copperheads cooperated by staying under their rocks. Soon James introduced me to his older sister Paige, and a dude from down the highway named John. They were all Cajuns, but they referred to themselves as coonasses.
It was all so new and even sorta exciting. After just a few weeks around them I began talking like them subconsciously dropping their Cajun accent into my speech. I tried to hang out with them as often as possible, but soon after the novelty factor wore off on both sides it became very apparent that if our lives had been a Sesame Street song; I was the one of those things that didn't belong here. I loved the country, but I wasn't a country boy like James and John. Paige was cute and I thought I'd dig hanging around her, but her personality was ugly with a capital U. So now I was even more lost and adrift than before. The loneliest person isn't sitting by themselves. The loneliest person is always sitting in a room full of people feeling like they are invisible and powerless to change this.
This was how I felt when I was around the Cajun kids. Not only did I lack the requisite country boy skills, but I was an ethnic minority around them. They weren't above throwing in some French patois, pointing at me, and then laughing. If there was any kind of dispute it was always two, or three if Paige was around, against my one small voice. Knowing I would never become the buck knife toting redneck they seemed to aspire to be, I did the one thing I knew might lead to some common ground among us and perhaps lead to that first pleasant novel stage again. I started listening to country music radio only. Which is not as drastic as it appears. I might have preferred Kiss, but I did grow up watching Porter Wagoner and Hee Haw.
This experiment lasted maybe 2 to 3 months. It was a blur of mainly Alabama, Hank Williams Jr,. David Frizzell, and Sylvia at the time. Only two songs really stand out for me now. One was by Janie Fricke where she sings she's gonna love you till the cows come home. The cows never really came home at Jimmy's; they just sort of ambled around the acreage so I guess Janie would have have had her work cut out for her there. The other song was Merle Haggard's "Are The Good Times Really Over (I Wish A Buck Was Still Silver)" which had been released in 1981. I knew Merle from a greatest hits collection my father owned and he stood out from the cosmopolitan country flavors Nashville was shoving down everyone's ears.
It didn't take long to realize that an appreciation for country music wasn't going to make me visible to the Cajuns or to anybody else. It wasn't long till my Cajun friends sold me out to a bully and I would learn that I wasn't so invisible, but now wished I had been. I went back to the heavy metal and punk music I truly loved. I slowly made new friends at Riverdale High. I took advantage of knowing Jimmy C. Newman and attended countless Grand Ole Opry shows and ran around Opryland by myself for free until the park closed. I'd ride the Grizzly River Rampage with a raft full of strangers and somehow it was okay. We were all snowballs headed to hell, right.
Friday, August 15, 2008
4 Years Of Blogging The Past
4 years of blogging. And this is the best I can do.
The very first post. I figured if DD's brother could do it so could I.
Brushes with greatness, the Phonoluxe years. I used to work at a record store in Nashville. Sometimes I miss it.
It took me 5 posts to tell the story of my first band. We were initially called Dalai Lamai Death Squad, but after I dislocated my thumb we had a new name. If you went to Riverdale in 1989 you probably saw us create some slam dancing mayhem. Our brief fame was Jabbstastic.
The Dislocated part one.
The Dislocated part two.
The Dislocated part three.
The Dislocated part four.
The Dislocated part five.
I obsess over things. Especially R.E.M., the White Animals, Mr. Zero, and The Replacements among many others including R.E.M. yet again.
The Nashville Rock History posts got more notice than anything. DD Blank came along for the ride for those 4 missives.
Rick Champion
Opened
A Hot
Dog Stand.
I did sometimes write about other things. Like peak oil. Seems rather quaint.
I sometimes wrote about awesome things like the birth of my son Liam. He'll be four years before early next year and he just gets cooler by the minute.
He got his first skateboard a few weeks ago. Maybe he'll write about being a skate rat one day. The skating days were truly some of the best days of my life.
Those days culminated in the skate punk of my second band, Michael Landon's Ghost, when we actually played at a skate park. It took me three posts to tell the tale and you can actually hear some old MLG recorded on a boom box if you're really brave.
It all comes back to rock and roll. Which can be traced to my Neanderthal upbringing raised on Elvis P, Coca-Cola, and Hardees.
And then there are those high school days. Maybe it's because I've never attended any of the reunions. Maybe it's because I really hated it until just about the last minute. Maybe it's just because I live on nostalgia - the pure junk food of the soul. Whatever. I've written about the nickname Wally, about the mixtape from HELL, yearbooks, and the glories of parachute pants.
I've written about Toby Holmes at least a couple of times or more and probably will again.
I've paid tribute to the Taylor's living room and Ms. Murks. Mitchell-Neilson Elementary represent!
I've binge drinked and went back to North Mississippi in spirit and for real.
The nicest thing I've ever read about this blog can be found here.
And that's about it. Cue the Little River Band.
The very first post. I figured if DD's brother could do it so could I.
Brushes with greatness, the Phonoluxe years. I used to work at a record store in Nashville. Sometimes I miss it.
It took me 5 posts to tell the story of my first band. We were initially called Dalai Lamai Death Squad, but after I dislocated my thumb we had a new name. If you went to Riverdale in 1989 you probably saw us create some slam dancing mayhem. Our brief fame was Jabbstastic.
The Dislocated part one.
The Dislocated part two.
The Dislocated part three.
The Dislocated part four.
The Dislocated part five.
I obsess over things. Especially R.E.M., the White Animals, Mr. Zero, and The Replacements among many others including R.E.M. yet again.
The Nashville Rock History posts got more notice than anything. DD Blank came along for the ride for those 4 missives.
Rick Champion
Opened
A Hot
Dog Stand.
I did sometimes write about other things. Like peak oil. Seems rather quaint.
I sometimes wrote about awesome things like the birth of my son Liam. He'll be four years before early next year and he just gets cooler by the minute.
He got his first skateboard a few weeks ago. Maybe he'll write about being a skate rat one day. The skating days were truly some of the best days of my life.
Those days culminated in the skate punk of my second band, Michael Landon's Ghost, when we actually played at a skate park. It took me three posts to tell the tale and you can actually hear some old MLG recorded on a boom box if you're really brave.
It all comes back to rock and roll. Which can be traced to my Neanderthal upbringing raised on Elvis P, Coca-Cola, and Hardees.
And then there are those high school days. Maybe it's because I've never attended any of the reunions. Maybe it's because I really hated it until just about the last minute. Maybe it's just because I live on nostalgia - the pure junk food of the soul. Whatever. I've written about the nickname Wally, about the mixtape from HELL, yearbooks, and the glories of parachute pants.
I've written about Toby Holmes at least a couple of times or more and probably will again.
I've paid tribute to the Taylor's living room and Ms. Murks. Mitchell-Neilson Elementary represent!
I've binge drinked and went back to North Mississippi in spirit and for real.
The nicest thing I've ever read about this blog can be found here.
And that's about it. Cue the Little River Band.
Eventide Riots
Vortices, voices, and a general clamoring -
Jackson Heights late night parking lot frisbee club -
Team of '87 and '88.
Hiram and his house of blue lights -
Stamping out litterbugs -
Especially Doug.
Red Mustang love no reaction-
Zulu Detective Agency was put on the case-
Memorial and Clark.
Exhaust, signs, and a Beetle-
Cutlass and run-
Pursuing pursued.
Fistfights, Eventide riots-
Hippie kid swings like a girl-
Street lamp obscure.
Jackson Heights late night parking lot frisbee club -
Team of '87 and '88.
Hiram and his house of blue lights -
Stamping out litterbugs -
Especially Doug.
Red Mustang love no reaction-
Zulu Detective Agency was put on the case-
Memorial and Clark.
Exhaust, signs, and a Beetle-
Cutlass and run-
Pursuing pursued.
Fistfights, Eventide riots-
Hippie kid swings like a girl-
Street lamp obscure.
Monday, August 11, 2008
4th Anniversary
4 years ago I began this blog. I was planning a big retrospective today, but it'll have to wait until later this week. So stay tuned.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Saturday, August 09, 2008
We Were The Kings Of Noise
Found this in a box the other day: a flyer for the first show I ever did with The Dislocated. It would have been either March or April 1989. The Gonz made up the flyer at the last minute since we were a late edition to the gig.
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