Gourds on Film

Since the turn of the century, I’ve been saying The Gourds are my favorite American band.  I’m not sure what that means.  Most of what comes out of the UK these days is the same old stuff, which is not an insult, but not since Pulp has a band from over there blown my doors off.  Favorite American band?  I think what I’m trying to say is they’re the my favorite band still playing.  Period.

And now some folks are trying to raise money to do a documentary on them. After I post this story, I’m going to get over to Kickstarter and make my donation.  Why not?  Even if I buy the DVD when it comes out, I’d still be dropping $20 or so after shipping, so it makes sense to kick in on the funding and make the thing happen.  Every few days I check in, and I suspect they’ll make that $45,000 goal by June 11.  Most likely from word of mouth at gigs and among fans on the web.  And things like this – if you’re reading this, a fan, and didn’t know about it, please, drop a few dollars, you know these guys are worth it.

I can’t even recall how I got into The Gourds.  I had the first album: 1996, Dem’s Good Beeble.  I can’t recall if I first heard them on Vin Scelsa’s radio show on WNEW, or if longstanding pal, P.J. turned me on to them.  P.J. actually knew the band at their inception, having lived in Austin in the early 90s, literally across the street from Jimmy Smith, and was privy to the early days of the band before the first album, which must have been a blast.  P.J. had followed his college flame to Austin, eventually married her, moved back up here to live on a farm her family owned in Otisville, NJ, eventually divorced her after the birth of their child, and I guess the one thing he can thank her for, aside from a good daughter, was her turning him onto The Gourds.  (It’s always a good idea to take the good with the bad when you look back on major disasters in your life, because there’s always some kind of good mixed in.)

That first album didn’t floor me at the time.  I remember thinking, “These guys sound like an updated version of The Band, with Kevin Russell nailing that rural Levon Helm vibe, and Jimmy Smith providing the looser Rick Danko element.”  I also recall the band denying they ever heard of The Band at the time, which was utter BS, even I knew that.  They knew their country and rock history.  I’d eventually come across Kevin’s earlier work in the Picket Line Coyotes, and that was one dude who must have worn out his copies of Murmur and Reckoning … so fucking glad he morphed into something else with his next band!

The next album, Stadium Blizter in 1998, that was where I got into them and started sending that “favorite band” vibe.  That was also the year of “Gin and Juice” … which probably would have been a lower Top 40 hit had they released it as a single.  But the band didn’t want to be considered as a novelty/cover act at the time, and the song floated all over the web in the nascent days of Napster, getting mis-labeled thousands of times over as being performed by Phish by stoner jam rock guys who must have had their heads completely up their asses.  It may not seem like much now, but that was a crucial point in the band history, one that could have broken them onto an entirely different level.  But, by choice, and by that weird misidentification, the big Wilco-style tour bus drove right by them, leaving them with the rental van and the 2-3 week touring schedule.

Son of a bitch, that and the next album, Ghosts of Hallelujah, blew my doors off.  Gangsta Lean.  Magnolia.  I Ate the Haggis.  There was such a looseness about their sound, the kind of looseness you had when you were seventeen, and the kind of looseness you never lost, providing you didn’t turn into a shithead when you grew up, as so many adults do.  This was the kind of country music I liked, and still like now.  Made by smart, loose guys from a rock background, who grew into country as they got older, but never forgot that sense of fun rock and roll has in its heart.  This was the sound of America, that melding of so many southern influences into one coherent whole, the same way people like Chuck Berry, Elvis, The Beach Boys and CCR did, once upon a time.  Not so much a conscious effort, just people joining their musical backgrounds and fitting it into a format that may be as old as the hills, but can easily sound new when someone brings his own take into it.  As opposed to the current state of pop country, which is a pathwork of bad cliches, 80s stadium rock with the occasional fiddle and/or steel guitar solo.

People are carrying about their latest album, Old Mad Joy, as if it will be their “breakthrough” … but let’s cut the bullshit.  These guys are never going to “breakthrough” in that blockbuster commercial way I’ve seen so many people imply in reviews.  Either these people aren’t listening correctly, or they’re just full of shit … knowing music critics, you know which option I angle towards.  It’s a good album.  All their albums are good.  The hype leading into it was this “real” producer Larry Campbell was going to take the band, in Levon Helm’s studio near Woodstock, no less, and forge a new sound of sorts that highlighted all their strengths.  I think we all pictured the guys in the cellar of Big Pink creating their version of The Basement Tapes.

Fucked if I can tell, but it sounds like any other good Gourds album I’ve bought in the past 15 years.  Not a breakthrough.  Not a higher level.  They always work on a high level.  It sounds like Campbell might have encouraged them to tighten up their sound, but that doesn’t necessarily make them a better band.  It sounds like doing so had the best effect on Jimmy Smith, or at least “Drop What I’m Doing” is the best song he’s done in years, one of the best Stones-style riffs you’ll ever hear.  I’ve always been more of a Kevin Russell fan (Gourds fans always seem to lean one way or the other), but the sum is always much greater than the parts with these guys, and Jimmy’s songs have that necessary rough-and-tumble quality that the band could not function without.  (Jimmy's song "The Blue Bottled One" from one of his solo albums is surely in my Top 3 by the band.)  Their greatness is that sense of union and tension between Kevin and Jimmy.

And it seems like they’re good enough guys, like each other enough, that whatever differences they have, they can keep it together and go on as a band.  That’s rare with musicians, and the whole band seems like they’re friends.  Compare and contrast with, say, The Ramones, driving around in vans for decades, and no one talking to each other at all, mile after mile, week after week, year after year. 

That’s got to be hell.  I sometimes fret when bands I love don’t make it on that larger level, but I’ve learned, by the same token, not making on that level generally allows you much more control of the product, and if you have enough of a fan base, freedom to tour at will and still make some kind of money.  Most people I know have no idea who The Gourds are, and I’m completely comfortable with that.  For the songs I’m compiling for a class reunion in July, I’m including “Gin and Juice” but doubt I’ll get a chance to slip it on between the Toby Keith and Rihanna and Beyonce and Loverboy and Seger and Madonna and Kid Rock and Lady Gaga and whatever else people in their 40s want to hear that still makes them feel cool.  Shit, I’d have about two dozen Gourds song in that mix if I were going to do it by my personal taste, but I’m not.  Class reunion is not hipster funhouse time, and like it or not, at least in the northeast, you’ve got to be a bit of a hipster, a 90s-style hipster of sorts, to be into The Gourds.  Or into alt country in general.  It might be different down south, and surely is in Texas, but up here, you say you’re a Gourds fan, the general response is, “Why not squash?”

I’ve met the guys a few times through P.J., and it always felt weird, as we’re talking pre-show in NYC.  Once, we even went backstage when they played the Bowery Ballroom.  I just felt like a dick.  The band is always a little nervous and in their own space before a show – any band is like that.  Well-wishers came by, guys who were clearly hipper than P.J. and I were, and we all felt like dicks … because The Gourds aren’t a black-turtleneck hipster sort of band.  I struck up a conversation with Kevin about college football which eventually turned into periodic email exchanges, but we lost that thread a long time ago, long before the demise of Paterno which I’ve written about extensively here, but Kevin struck me as a very smart, funny, warm guy … just like his songs.  Jimmy’s just like his songs, too, you half expect the guy to wear a bell around his neck so he doesn’t get lost in the streets before the show.  I remember one show, pre-show, seeing him on the street, and looking away, because I figured he wouldn’t remember me, but damn, when I looked back, I caught him looking away with a “shit, I know that guy, but this is New York and we have to play it cool” look on his face.  Shit.  I’ve always felt like an asshole over that moment.

But, I’m rattling on here.  Go find the band if you already haven’t.  I’m now going to head over to Kickstarter and drop down a healthy donation, so I can get my DVD when the time comes.  There are two bands I grew up with: The Replacements and The Gourds.  While Paul Westerberg seems to have dropped out for the time being, and that’s somebody I’ll hang in there with, no matter how much he pisses me off, The Gourds have never let me down as musicians.  I was well into my 20s when I heard them, as were they, and they've felt like that one band I could pace my life with and still feel some ongoing connection in the music they make and how I live.  They’re never going to get what they deserve, but that seems to be a running theme in most of my favorite musicians’ lives, not to mention my own!

We Are Young

The desk-top AM radios at work keep playing this song “We Are Young” by the band fun in a way that I know implies #1 single.  More than a few women at work still listen to the local AM Top 40 stations as they work.  As a result, I’m exposed to some of the most heinous shit imaginable, but it at least tips me off on what kids find popular these days.  With a class reunion coming up, it also tips me off on which current tracks to include in the mix, that some drunk person in his 40s might request, although the thought of some guy my age baying out this song is something I hope doesn’t transpire that night.

And it’s not that we aren’t young.  In the grand scheme of things, we’re just over halfway there.  That’s what you grasp about life in your 40s.  You might die any time in the next 20 years over some unforeseen health issue: a massive heart attack or early cancer of some sort.  But you might also live another 40+ years.  It’s hard to grasp how life moves and works without living through it, because I’d have no concept that there was still such a long way to go at this point in my life.  When you’re in your 20s, especially towards the 30 end, you start to grasp that this “instant youth” shit you’re being over-fed culturally on a daily basis is revolting and tiresome.  People feel “old” at 26 because they’re inundated with these images of how they’re supposed to feel at this age (young! vibrant! wacky! alive!), when their reality is slow entry in adulthood, and the realization that life is what it is, and some days that’s going to suck, or just be another day, as opposed to this fireworks display of euphoria they’re being misled to believe in. 

This song itself isn’t bad.  I’m glad Fueled by Ramen is getting some sort of cash windfall, as much as this song troubles me, as I bought more than a few indie songs from the label in the 90s.  It’s catchy, even with the annoying, slick production values that date it immediately.  Of course, that ersatz euphoria noted above is the troubling issue.  Sample lyrics: 

My friends are in the bathroom getting higher than the Empire State
My lover she’s waiting for me just across the bar
My seat’s been taken by some sunglasses asking bout a scar, and
I know I gave it to you months ago
I know you’re trying to forget
But between the drinks and subtle things
The holes in my apologies, you know
I’m trying hard to take it back
So if by the time the bar closes
And you feel like falling down, I’ll carry you home

Tonight, we are young
So let’s set the world on fire
We can burn brighter than the sun

The verses are nothing to write home about, but the chorus bursts forth in a triumphant wave, that sort of “singalong in the arena” vibe they were going for, and hats off for achieving it.

I can’t figure out whether the singer knows he’s full of shit, or whether he takes himself very seriously.  I’m willing to wager he started out knowing he was full of shit, but now that there are people falling all over him and treating him like a mini-god, he’s taking himself (and this silly song) very seriously.  It has that one-hit wonder vibe to it, the kind of thing that will be played at high-school reunions 10 years from now, and a bunch of rapidly aging 28-year-olds will go “fuck yeah” and pound one down.  I understand this song first became a hit when the cast of the TV show Glee immortalized it in song.  And that’s one teenage phenomenon that is way out of my jurisdiction, as the one time I tried to watch the show, I projectile vomited for the entire five minutes it was on the TV.

What really troubled me was finding there’s an entire Wikipedia entry edicated to this song alone (which probably makes sense, as opposed to the band and/or album, because this one song is going to be it for them).  And this passage in particular: “‘We Are Young’ received immense praise and positive commentary from major music critics and is considered a breakthrough for the indie music genre. Jody Rosen of Rolling Stone called the song ‘rollickingly catchy,’ writing that ‘Ruess' knack for the anthemic is matched by Gen-Y humor – emo self-deprecation that leavens the bombast.’ … Spin reviewed the track positively based on its inclusion in the album, singling it out for ‘marrying fist-pump stadium rock to the prim indie-pop of Grizzly Bear's ‘Two Weeks,’ keeping the deliberate beats and soaring melodies but replacing choirboy primness with a percussive whomp.’”

If you want to know why I got out of writing about music professionally, there it is.  Because a song like this … my god, you’d have thrown it on my desk, I’d have shit myself laughing over the concept of having to hype it for a living.  And that’s exactly what those critics are doing.  I hesitate to call them whores – that’s too kind a word.  They’re simply liars.  Because I know they have the cultural knowledge and experience to see this song for what it is, and they should have the courage to stand their ground and write off a piece of fluff like this for what it is: cynical, mediocre product aimed at manipulating that dislocated, unreal sense of grandeur kids mistakenly attach to their youth.  But these people don’t want to lose their jobs, so they keep log rolling with everyone else.  Don’t cry for me, Argentina: if I had to do that for a living, I would be suicidal.

I’ve been thinking about this more lately due to a few things.  For one, I went to the NYC Public Library and took out the first season for The Monkees tv show (with the second on hold).  I love The Monkees – always have.  Their music was a core part of my early childhood in the late 60s and throughout the 70s via reruns and such.  The shows were fun, but they’re hard to watch now, as it’s basically Gilligan’s Island type humor with the requisite two-per-show musical romps based on the same frolics The Beatles did in A Hard Day’s Night and Help!.

But even with how much I love the band, I can see why they caught so much shit in their time, the desperate level of cynicism, no different than what I see going on now with “We Are Young,” that’s employed to sell product to kids.  The Monkees had it written into their theme song: “We’re the young generation/And we got something to say.”  The closing theme from their second season reinforced the point: “In this generation/In this loving time/In this generation/We will make the world a-shine.”

The concept of “youth culture” weighed more heavily in the 60s than at any other time in our history, before or since.  People genuinely thought a revolution was occurring, a before and after moment that would divide an older/out-of-touch generation with the newer one who understood life on some pure, basic level.  That wasn’t true.  At all.  True, a lot of good came from the 60s, but a lot of bad, too, and in the end, more than anything, I’ll take the music over anything else from that time.  The Monkees were two actors and two musicians carefully picked to helm a network TV show aimed squarely at kids and the market The Beatles had created for this kind of music.  It was done brilliantly.  The music was and is excellent.  And The Monkees themselves proved themselves up to the task, especially Mike Nesmith, who went on to have a respectable solo career in a more country vein.

But just watching these episodes now, phew, it’s harder than I had anticipated!  The Monkees caught shit because they made light of “the revolution” and because it was obvious that “the establishment” had everything to do with their existence.  Of course, it may not have been so obvious that the establishment was just as responsible for allowing any legendary rock act, be it Jimi Hendrix or The Doors, to exist.  But it was painfully obvious with The Monkees, and all of them eventually paid the price for tying themselves down to the teen market, as any act does that directly attaches their success to a certain time or age.  The same will happen to fun as they go along.  But as The Beach Boys never became The Beach Men, nor The Beastie Boys Beastie Men, fun will never become no fun.  They’ll be fun to their fans always, and serve as a nice roadside marker in the lives of the fans as they speed away into the distance of live moving on.

In tandem with all this, I recently picked up a cheap copy of Where the Wild Things Are, the Spike Jonze movie based on the 1963 book by Maurice Sendak, that I, and every kid I knew growing up in the 60s and 70s, had read repeatedly.  I loved that book – how the monsters in the forest were portrayed, the perfect invitation to kids to let their imaginations run wild as they paged through the book.  I had seen trailers for the movie when it came out, and was a little alarmed that they were using an Arcade Fire song to hype it, but I thought when I saw the puppets they had playing the monsters, man, that looks pretty cool, if I ever see a cheap copy, I’ll pick one up.

And so I did.  I have to say, Jonze did an excellent job of bringing the monsters to life.  The eyes of the puppets are amazing, heavy with human emotions.  There’s a lot right about this movie … but the fucking soundtrack.  Forever frozen in time – the early 2000s – by a shitty soundtrack.  All these chirpy, cute, hand-clappy/foot-stomping indie rock songs that are just putrid.  It deeply mars the movie for me.  For me, this is an early childhood memory, mark it down to 1970 or 1971.  Most kids of my generation read that book only a few years after it was written – I’m sure it also reached into the next generation of kids as I was always seeing those Sendak monsters in cultural references over the course of my life.  It’s not tied down to any type of music.  Had they made a movie about the book in 1970 – and used the fucking Monkees, or the Archies, or Bobbie Sherman, to do the soundtrack, it would have marred the experience in the same way.  Never mind that I can’t stand that twee sort of indie pop espoused in the movie.  Even if I liked it, I would still sense that it was out of touch with the timeless theme of the subject matter.

And the central character, the little boy, Max, was portrayed as too much of a prick for me in the movie.  I don’t recall having that feeling when I read the book as a child.  Max wasn’t a prick.  In the movie, he surely is!  He’s portrayed as fatherless, lonely and angry all the time … thus his need to strike out for a fantasy world of monsters and empires to be conquered.  Fuck.  I was a happy kid.  It was enough just to escape into a book, whatever my emotional state.  It feels like this movie was created to tap into some type of faux anger kids are supposed to relate to, I guess because so many are raised in split families these days, and somehow justify Max’s need to escape into a fantasy world.  We don’t need that justification … ever.  For any reason.  It’s OK if you want to read comics, or Sci Fi, or just get lost in a book or movie or song.  It bothered me that a character I knew to be pure and uncomplicated in my childhood was made to be, essentially, an emotionally-damaged little prick, in the movie adaptation.

So, what I’ve written about here seems to come down to reality and fantasy, and the need we have for each.  Reality of the adult world vs. the fantasies of childhood which, these days, extend well into our 20s and include mistaking getting drunk with your friends in a bar as “setting the world on fire.”  I’ve been drunk with friends in bars in my 20s.  I didn’t set the world on fire.  I was lucky not piss my pants most nights.  The best I could hope for was a short, clean break from the realities of my day-to-day life and a nice sense of human connection that doesn’t always present itself when everyone is sober.  Now, how in the hell are you going to write a hit song about that?  You don’t.  You write this.

August 29, 1983: Serious Moonlight

Knowing I’m an alumni and a fan, people at work have been ragging me on the topic of Penn State football since this Sandusky scandal broke last fall. Not nearly as much lately, but one of the guys got into the topic of that perfect season from the early part of Joe Paterno’s career for which they didn’t receive the national championship. I had thought that President Nixon somehow decided who would be national champ that year.

A little research showed that the season was 1969, Nixon had only suggested in a newspaper article that the winners of another bowl showdown should determine the champion, and he was probably right as Penn State didn’t play a single ranked team leading up to their bowl-game win.

In doing that research, I stumbled onto a yearly listing of their records, and one date really stood out for me: August 29, 1983. The night Penn State played in the annual “kickoff classic” at Giants Stadium, as reigning national champions after defeating Georgia 27-23 in the Sugar Bowl on New Years Day. That game was probably the apex of my Penn State fandom and best memory, as they played a great game and shut down Hershel Walker who had been tearing up every team Georgia played up to that point.

But I remember August 29th of that year like it was yesterday. I had just wrapped up my first summer in the factory, had one year of college under my belt and was days away from starting my next. I remember feeling fantastic, had a lot of money for myself at the time, was tanned, in great shape from running all the time, really getting a sense of moving forward in life.

The day doesn’t stand out because of Penn State, but because of a quandary I had to face. Obviously, I was pumped to watch that game on TV, but in the mean time, my group of friends had learned that David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour was coming to Hershey, PA that same night, and it seemed like a real opportunity to see him perform, still in his prime. His Let’s Dance album was ruling the charts that summer, thanks to MTV. I wasn’t that crazy about the title track (my opinion has changed over the years), but the lead-off single, “Modern Love,” was one of those typical Bowie hits, a sonic punch that was just a brilliant little pop gem.

I was a huge Bowie fan, starting with the ChangesOneBowie greatest hits eight track brother M bought and wore out in a matter of months. I started buying his other albums, beginning with Ziggy Stardust (this was probably 1976 or so, a few years after the fact), and that was one of those albums I played all the way through a few times in one sitting, for weeks on end. It’s hard to communicate the seismic shift that took place in a kid’s head in the 1970’s when he discovered a recording artist like David Bowie, but there was a before and after, no doubt.

Bowie is one of the most misinterpreted artists of the rock era, often mistaken as a trailblazer and innovator. He innovated nothing. His brilliance was in taking nascent trends (like glitter and synths) that a relatively small audience of hip people knew about, grasping that style of music in an extremely short amount of time, then putting out his own take on the trend … long before the average rock fan had any idea the trend existed. Thus mistaking Bowie as the first glam rock star, or the guy who made synthesizers cool with his Low album. (Marc Bolan was way out in front of Bowie on the glam front, and it’s painfully obvious that Bowie loved German bands like Neu, Can and Kraftwerk, thus his Low album. Which bombed at the time. And which, frankly, is more about recording effects applied to guitars, drums and keyboards than anything else. Listen to “Sound and Vision” from that album; it’s a guitar-based song with one of the nuttiest drum sounds I’ve ever heard.)

For me, it was the actual songs themselves, the guy has always had great pop sense, and his lyrics. Which tend to be nonsensical, but in ways that suggest a certain mood that suits the music. I catch the paper boy, but things don’t really change, I’m standing in the rain, but I never wave bye-bye, but I try. Huh? Sit on your hands on a bus of survivors, blushing at all the afro-sheeners?

There’s always been a surface slickness to his work, but with more than enough talent underneath to suggest this was an artist you should pay attention to, always. That’s the perfect definition of rock star. Most of them don’t go too deep in terms of real emotion or communication, but they get across these larger, sweeping concepts in highly entertaining ways that many of us recognize as someone tapped into a deep reserve of talent. (Of course, that’s all faded now … that kind of rock star … and the massive, unified fan base to suggest some type of large gathering of like-minds. We’re left with fragmented flashes of brilliance and a lot of shit rising to the top.)

And that time in the summer of 1983, Bowie was as popular as he would ever get. MTV had a lot to do with that, taking an artists who always understood the concept of image, and allowing him to create this slick, cultured, suit-wearing guy, with an unloosened tie, tan and dyed-blonde hair, like a male model trying to appear more business-like, or a business man with a highly-evolved sense of style. It suited the music he was making at the time, a much more polished take on the riskier 70s image, more user friendly, meant to register with 80s kids, which it surely did.

We had to go see him. Penn State be damned. Major artists like that would occasionally play the stadium next to Hershey Park, but not always. More often than not, when we went to see concerts, it was in the much smaller Stabler Arena in Bethlehem, where I saw my first concert, J. Geils Band, a few years earlier. Seeing Bowie in Hershey would be my first stadium concert, and we were all excited as hell to see this guy we knew only through eight tracks, album covers and the radio.

So, the day came, late August, we all piled into the old man’s used station wagon and made the hour or so journey south to Hershey, blasting Bowie tapes (at this point, surely cassette tapes) the whole way, getting in the mood. There must have been five of us, recalling brother J and neighbor B, but I seem to recall two or three other people along for the ride. As always, we felt like rubes when we got down there. Even presented with kids who were raised in the slightly more urbanized southern part of the state, we assumed they were in on something we weren’t. I’ve since realized people from around Harrisburg or Bethlehem/Allentown and surrounding cities can still be rubes in the grand scheme of things, despite seeing themselves otherwise. We were always raised thinking Reading was a big, rough-and-tumble/to-be-avoided city, but it’s just a faded small city with a shitload of big city problems.

We got our seats, around the far end of the 20 yard line, with the stage in the other end zone. It was a long ways off! To make matters worse, a lighting crane whirred into action just as we sat down and thus blocked our view of the stage. Luckily for us, they repositioned by a few feet, but that only cause another section of seats to start hooting and hollering.

It felt … impersonal. I’ve always felt that way sitting in a stadium, be it for a sports or music event. I don’t like going to stadiums, period. You can give me the best seat in the house, and I won’t care. Just too many people! Way too much hassle getting in and out. The amount of shit you have to put up with just to see a show is unbelievable. And, especially with rock and roll, you’re constantly made to feel like dogshit on the shoes of the staff and everyone else working in an official capacity. This is pretty much why I don’t go out much anymore to see bands, even in clubs, which can be just as problematic and uncomfortable.

We were crowded in with a fairly typical bunch of 70s rock fans who didn’t give a damn about the 80s or time moving forward. That’s another thing about rock and roll, you get to see where people, the fans of a given artist, stamp their foot down and say, this is where it ends for me. “It” being the desire to hear new music and open yourself to other things … the way we all once did with the given artist in question. They found a home … in most cases, it looked like Diamond Dogs circa 1975, that weird, patchy haircut, the crystal meth and pot, jeans and t-shirt, none of this faggoty disco/punk shit, no sir! And I can’t blame them. Diamond Dogs was a pretty good place to stop. But all I could think was, Diamond Dogs seemed like a pretty good place to start …

So, we’re sitting there, getting high on the pot cloud that hovered over any large-scale rock show in the 70s or 80s, and the opening act comes on: Tenpole Tudor. Had never heard of him at that point. He looked like a tall, skinny guy trying to be one of The Stray Cats, who were enormously popular at the time. I thought he wasn’t bad, a vaguely rockabilly thing going on, very stripped down, rocking out, small drum kit, bassist and guitarist doing their thing in front of a huge, closed curtain on a massive stage.

Of course, they were out of place. And as with nearly every opening act I’ve seen in a large venue, completely ignored by the crowd, who would get in the habit of baying out “Bowie” after about 20 minutes of the act. The worst case of this ever for me was seeing The Replacements open up for Elvis Costello at Madison Square Garden. For me, that was a dream show, my favorite band from the 80s matched with a guy who could do no wrong in my book as a recording artist. And the Costello fans treated The Replacements like non-entities. I couldn’t believe it. Even that small gap between Costello breaking big (late 70s) and The Replacements making a name for themselves (mid-80s) was just enough to create a void with the Costello fans, that thousands upon thousands of them didn’t know or care who The Replacements were. Paul and the gang knocked out a perfunctory set and left … Costello came out, bearded and the size of a house at that point in his career, and played just fine, but I left that night feeling a bit cheated, and extremely let down by a bunch of people who should have been more savvy.

Tenpole Tudor went on around 7:00 at night, so he was clearly going to play about 45 minutes, let the sun go down around 8:00, so Bowie could play in the dark. In that down time before darkness, I snuck away to buy a t-shirt, my mythical Bowie Let’s Dance gray muscle t that cost more than the ticket for the show! As an adult, and for years now, I’ve not been in the habit of wearing t-shirts that advertise anything: bands, magazines, products, free mustache rides. I only wear blank shirts: black, blue or white. But for a long time, I was king of the message t-shirt, and it seemed crucial to buy a shirt at a concert. Of course, it’s always a rip-off, but I also know now, this is where a huge portion of the concert revenue for an artist is generated, fans buying these hideously over-priced shirts as mementos of any given night. I recall the stand beneath the bleachers, the half dozen or so choices, the rays of the sun cutting through the bleachers, me, thinking, shit, man, I’m buying a Bowie concert t-shirt, this is great!

Well, that thing got lost over the course of decades. I suspect Mom, in one of her cleaning fits after I moved out in the late 80s, probably put it in a black trash bag and gave it to the local Goodwill store. About a decade ago, I saw that same shirt being sold on E Bay for $75.00! I think we all had a few concert shirts like that, the kind people would one day pay top dollar for and wear for “retro” cool effect. Frankly, I looked like a dick in that shirt, which is probably why I didn’t wear it that much.

But about quarter after 8:00, lights went down, everyone started carrying on, lo and behold, Bowie and band exploded on the stage in a blaze of light, and I can’t even recall what song he opened with. He had his canary yellow suit on, and the band looked like a bunch of jackasses, the horn section wearing pith helmets and explorer khaki outfits, guitarist Carlos Alomar wearing a fezz and some kind of black, Indian-looking dress, lead guitarist Earl Slick in an 80s headband and the sort of Chess King-looking pants and peasant shirt, the two male background singers decked out in seersucker suits and fedoras that made them looked like southern attorneys at a garden party in Savannah.

It was a mind-fuck of a show. Naturally, we were all impressed with the lighting, the first time we had seen such effects, the laser shows, the multi-colored spots, the fog banks, etc. He put on a rock show, no doubt about it. And we could barely see it. It was like watching a touchdown from the other 20 yard line! This was before video screens, so all we saw was this little flame-hared guy in a yellow suit, about 100 yard away, and his weirdly-attired band. The sound was pretty bad: it was a stadium. Music wasn’t meant to be played like this outdoors. In a natural amphitheater, sure, but not a flattened out field surrounded by a metal casing. The echo was terrible. Nothing wrong with the sound system, but there’s just so much you can do in a place like this.

About the only stand-out for me was his different take on “Heroes.” He started the song slow, mumbling these incoherent lyrics, that, knowing Bowie, really meant something, he was imparting something profound, and those mumblings ended with, “I will be king/And … you … will … be … queen.” And the band exploded into that huge guitar riff on the last word, a great moment. I later found out that Bowie was singing, “Lavender blue, duh-luh-di-doo, Lavender green, duh-luh-di-doo, I will be king, etc.” He was probably giving instructions to the lighting crew on what shade spot light to use! I was let down to learn that he wasn’t adding some profound message to the already-profound message of “Heroes.” The dude wanted to swim like dolphins, man!

I was able to track down that version of the song years later, as part of a bootleg of pre-tour rehearsals that he played in a small Dallas club with originally-planned lead guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn. Enjoy! I recall that it was a money issue with Stevie Ray, as I’m sure he wanted more than sideman pay, and everything worked out fine, as he then went on to push his solo career over the top at that time. Earl Slick could probably play Bowie’s songs blind-folded as he seemed to ride shotgun on so many of his tours and albums.

Aside from that? Honestly, the show got boring, fast. And I have to be honest, that feeling has overcome me at some point in nearly every live show I’ve ever attended. Sometimes the whole show will be like that. Other times, just a few minutes. But at some point, I look around and think, this is bullshit. It’s too much. I’m uncomfortable as hell. We’re packed in like sardines here. There are a lot of people acting like small children, taking this thing as an opportunity to “cut loose” and essentially be pricks. Same vibe as sporting events. People getting too drunk and high. Taking piss breaks constantly. Baying like idiots in ways that don’t suggest irony but brain damage. I sort of look at myself in an imaginary mirror when I see shit like this going on and think, “Am I part of this?” And the answer is no, but I have to accept the fact that this special thing to me, the profound relationship I feel towards this artist’s music, is shared by people who appear to be complete jackasses!

I ask myself, what’s going on here? What is this thing? We pay a truckload of money to attend this thing, get treated like shit every step of way, are forced into bleachers or crappy plastic seats, then spend the rest of our time dealing with people in the immediate vicinity getting into mild forms of weirdness, be it piss breaks or fist fights or talking/yelling constantly through a set, all the while, trying to take in a show that sounds choppy because it’s been booked into a venue that was never meant to host musical events. At some point, I don’t understand the process. In younger days, I’d just bite my tongue and keep buying the tickets. Now, I just say fuck it! I can see going to small club shows where there is some type of musicianship going on – think celtic music being played live by accomplished musicians, or blues, or jazz, or even some quieter kind of folk or country. But this blowzy, balls-out, rock-and-roll, party-time event … what an over-rated ritual I’ve found these things to be over the years. Music makes sense to me personally in my every-day life, but loses its meaning for me in these staged events.

But, this realization was years down the road that night! We all told ourselves this was fucking wild, man, this was incredible … but it was just a well-staged rock show put on by a consummate professional who looked like a dot on the faraway stage and sounded muddy by the time the music reached us in our bleacher seats.

I’ve since realized that I could very easily bump into Bowie on the streets of New York, as he lives here, walks around with no fanfare, keeps a low profile. It just seems odd to try to make that connection between this ordinary guy on the street, and this shiny star at the center of these traveling events, that went on for years, that influenced millions of kids, that made perfect, beautiful sense to me the first time I slapped Ziggy Stardust on that cheap bedroom stereo. I think that’s where they myth begins. Falling in love with that sound, the word play, the sense of style, knowing this is someone who has something to tell me, even if it makes no sense, it sounds like it makes perfect sense. But then to realize I’m not the only one getting it, that millions of other people do, too. But one day, I could turn a corner on Broadway, and there Bowie will be, looking through the window of a bookstore, in an overcoat, just an average guy I could walk up to, say hello, thank him for making those albums, and he’d probably nod and be gracious, so long as I was cool and brief about it.

It’s obvious why a moment like that would mean more to me than any massive concert. Because that’s how I understand music, on this small, one-to-one level. That’s how you’re reading me now, on your computer, in your room, or wherever. You read along, if you really like what I’m writing, you keep on reading. I understand life at this level. When you times it by a million and attach all these other values to that human connection, that’s when things get weird for me, and I enter this vaguely troubling misunderstanding with how this all works. But that’s rock and roll, and I wouldn’t be “getting it” on any level if it hadn’t been marketed on that large a level, so I guess I have to take the good with the bad.

I’m glad we saw Bowie that night. Not so much for the act of seeing Bowie (which was the only time I saw him). But because when we got out in the parking lot and turned on the radio, we came up on the football game in the last minutes of the fourth quarter, with Nebraska beating Penn State 44-6. They got their asses kicked! I’ve sat through more than a few Penn State games like that in my lifetime, but that one, coming on the heels of a national championship, was surely a bad, bad feeling. Had we stayed home to watch that? We would have sat there grumbling and moaning the whole time, getting deeply upset in the way sports make us feel when our team gets shellacked in an important game. Had we skipped seeing Bowie to sit there at home and watch that happen? Even worse.

So we drove home that night, howling up Route 81 around midnight, still buzzing from the big concert, “TVC15” blasting from the tape deck, but coming back to reality where our football team now officially sucked.

Save the iPod!

I’ve been living in the cloud the past few weeks, although not this new-age cloud of streaming music and movie files. The cloud of non-Apple devices and the unbelievable amount of nonsense you need to put up with occasionally to make the devices work properly.

It’s been a few years – I’ve forgotten. And I do have non-Apple devices that work well. The laptop I’m typing this on, for instance. And the Kindle I bought last fall – a fantastic device that works as advertised. But I’m thinking more portable MP3 devices.

For years, I denied the pull of iPods. To me, they seemed like frilly little things people bought purely as accessories to demonstrate how “cool” they were. For most people, they are just that, to this day. Most models don’t hold a lot of music, and the people who carry them don’t have or know a lot of music to put on the device. Therefore, the concept of an iPod with a 32GB capacity seems like a limitless sea of possibilities that they will never fill up.

For me, 32 GB is a bump in the road. Before iPods, I used Creative Nomad Zen players. Had to – at the time, they were the only game in town for larger players, and I first bought a 30 GB player, and then a 60 GB player which, at the time, seemed like a huge field to play on. And so it was, but because it was so big, I figured, time to really dig down in my collection and start putting on music that I know I want to have with me at all times. Hardly entire album and artist collections. But if you’re talking about bands like The Beatles, Kinks or Rolling Stones, there are hundreds of tracks that apply for each bands. I didn’t go wild – I rationally asked myself, now that I have a bigger playing field, what songs do I want immediate access to at all times.

And I kept on with my Emusic account, often taking out monthly booster packs to add extra tracks when I stumbled on an artist who had an intriguing catalog that I wanted to flesh out. And friends, as they do, kept on sending me DVD-Rs and flash drives with enormous amounts of music on them, thousands of songs … which I’d sort through and find what I wanted. And that golden age of blogs and websites that had rare and out-of-print albums on them as RAR files … an age which seems to be passing now with the crackdown on copyright infringement. (I have no problem pulling down music from websites that’s either hard-to-find, absurdly import priced or out of print … not to mention a vast ocean of live and demo material that I used to pay top dollar for at small mom-and-pop record stores that quietly sold this stuff as bootlegs.)

It didn’t take me long to push the limits of 60 GB. I came to a point where I had to start deleting music from the Creative Nomad player because there was no more space, which pissed me off, but what choice did I have? And a few months after that, Apple rolled out it’s 160 GB iPod Classic. Which blew the Creative Nomad (and every other portable device) out of the water with nearly 100 more GB of space. As much as I didn’t want to give my money to Apple and be mistaken for just another hipster with those telltale white earbuds, what choice did I have?

And buying that player was a revelation. It showed me a few things about Apple. The most obvious thing was they charged too much for their product, reason number one why I was never a fan. But they also showed me that while they get away with this, they also put out superior product. Simply stated, the 160 GB iPod Classic was and is the best MP3 player ever made for music lovers. Enough room to roam, the design is such that the player is no larger than half a deck of cards, the battery life is astounding, and iTunes, once you get used to it, is fairly easy to use and convenient. (I know the number of people out there who despise iTunes as a media player is legion, but aside from one glitch a few years ago where an upgrade messed with my files tags, I’ve had zero problems with the software.)

This device has been everything I ever wanted in a portable music player. And so I took the time to re-tag all my files to fit into this new format and started down the iPod road. I’ve gone hog wild in the past few years in terms of branching out into other forms of music. Celtic. African. Brazilian. A smattering of Asian and Indian. Jazz. Classical. I’ve always been curious about these kinds of music, so why not delve in, now that we’re in the digital age, I can sample everything before I buy it, and roam around fairly easily, building good-sized sampling of any genre in a fraction of the time it used to take. Owning this iPod made that not just possible, but somehow pushed me outward to find these things, since I had such a large space to use.

I’ve been on it for five years now with this player, but now find myself coming up on only 10 GB of space left on the player. And now that Apple is doing one of its usual “fuck you, we don’t care what you want, we’re going to tell you what you want, and then we’re going to tell everyone this is the future we must all live in” marketing campaigns for “the cloud” … it seems very unlikely that they’re ever going to put out a new model MP3 player with a larger drive than the 160 GB iPod Classic. In their eyes, it won’t be necessary … we have “the cloud” … there’s no need to store anything anymore.

Well, I know enough about computers to know what bullshit this is. The world, or at least America, is not yet ready for portable device streaming, and may not be for a very long time to come. For one thing, there are data caps in place on most cellphones that crap out after 2.5 GB of monthly data usage. I know … the past few months, my internet use at home has been determined solely by a Virgin Mobile flash-drive 3G modem that I spend $50/month on to get “unlimited” data (which slows to a crawl after 2.5 GB … and is already achingly slow as-is when compared to cable or DSL). I’ve learned not to watch video on the computer with this thing – if I do, I easily reach 2.5 GB of data usage inside a week or two. As it is, I push the limit of usage every month just sampling and downloading from my monthly Emusic account. I don’t even stream music – I can’t. The stream breaks up constantly. When I sample a 30-second piece of music on Emusic to see if I want to buy the track, invariably, the stream will stop somewhere in that 30 seconds, usually somewhere around the 15-second mark.

Using this flash-drive modem been an education on “streaming” and “the future” as it replicates what someone would experience using a phone to “stream media in the cloud.” It sucks. Until folks like AT&T and Verizon decide that we all have unlimited data usage for any plan we choose, streaming on a portable device is not an option. Sounds like a no-brainer? I don’t see it happening. I think AT&T now has a truly unlimited data plan for $80/month … but do you want to pay $80/month for only one device on top of your normal monthly home cable/DSL charges? And that one device is your phone. If you really love music … do you want to listen to music only on your smart phone? With a stream that most likely has lesser sound quality than the MP3s you listen to and, I don’t care what anyone else tells you, will crap out routinely, like when you go underground for any reason (a constant with most New Yorkers and the subway) or enter any kind of situation where streaming signals grow hazy (being out in the country, on open highways, in office buildings, etc.)?

No. The “cloud” is cool for people who don’t have a lot at stake musically. Who look at 32 Gigs of space as a vast sea of space for their music. For those of us who blew by 32 Gigs as an after-thought, streaming is not an option. I’d gather most of us in this boat understand implicitly, there is no substitute for having music you’ve acquired, there in actual files, in the palm of your hand, not being streamed to your device as a monthly rental. I’ve tried a service like Spotify, one of the larger new streaming music sites. It’s fantastic … for the home computer. I can sample albums in their entirety, even put on whole albums and just let them play … on the home computer, with cable. But I would sure hate to try using that on a device. Forget about the monthly data caps that would be reached in a week or two – just knowing the stream would stop and garble routinely in the NYC living area, and drop out completely for the half hour I spend each day on the way to and from work in Manhattan is enough to put me off.

So, faced with this “future” of streaming I recognize as a hard sell to people who don’t really like or care about music (as I’ve stated in the past, that constitutes a massive portion of the audience the music industry pays total attention to for their teenage lifespan, while basically ignoring everyone else), it just doesn’t wash with people who love music. In theory, it should. But theory doesn’t recognize the reality of data caps and satellite signals that grow hazy the farther you get from populated areas … which could be just as easy as hitting any interstate near any major city and driving no more than few miles into the countryside. Or taking a subway train. Or being in an office in any metropolitan area where cellphone service is bad to non-existent.

So what do I do? I do the next best thing. There’s one other device out there that trumps the 160 GB iPod Classic in terms of drive space: the Archos 48 Internet tablet, with a whopping 500 GB hard drive. Not sure why they call it a tablet – it’s larger than an iPod, but I can still fit it into my shirt pocket. It feels like a monster next to the iPod, which I attribute, again, to the brilliance of the design team at Apple. I bought one of these a few weeks ago, for $200, considerably less than the iPod Classic. And I was thinking, “I hate to abandon the iPod (and won’t for at least the rest of the year or so), but I’m being left no choice as someone with a large music collection who wants to go on listening and branching out … as anyone who loves music is supposed to do over the course of his life.”

And that’s the cloud I’ve been living in the past few weeks … trying to get this god-damned Archos player up to snuff. It’s been an enormous pain in the ass. Just finding the right software/media player to act as a solid transfer point to the device was a problem. (iTunes is a completely closed system that will not transfer to any non-Apple device.) I finally stumbled on Media Monkey, which I actually like more than iTunes as a media player, and respect a great deal as it pulled all the songs from my iTunes library and had a very good percentage of tagging everything properly. (I’d say about 300 tracks didn’t work out right and had to be re-tagged, but that’s not bad considering there were over 24,500 all together.) Unlike iTunes, it can mimic iTunes itself, and then allow the user to transfer the files from Media Monkey onto any non-Apple player.

Which is what I’ve been doing the past two weeks. I’ve learned a serious lesson in data transfers that you had better dot every “i” when doing something this large, as getting anything wrong will require you to scrub/erase the data and start all over again … which I’ve done three times between Media Monkey and the Archos player. The auto-synch also takes forever. When I auto-synch from the iTunes library to the iPod, it takes literally seconds. This things takes 20 minutes just to read the files, and then an indeterminate amount of time to dis-mount the player. I’m doing this process right now, for instance, since my last data transfer was mostly successful, but neglected to copy my dozens of playlists. I’ve been sitting here over 45 minutes waiting for the auto-synch to end and may well just get frustrated and un-plug the device from the USB port. It shouldn’t take this long to synch up a player that already has all the tracks on it.

Just one of more than a few issues I’ve had, and it’s made me realize Archos puts out a pretty choppy product. Unfortunately for now, the only product larger than the 160 GB iPod. I do like the device, but the amount of shit I’ve had to go through is not worth it. And don’t get me started on the anti-Apple tech heads who over-populate the online forums for Media Monkey and Archos. When you have to run scripts, and get into your computer registry, and write code, and make sure every minute aspect of a transfer is perfect, and run de-bugging programs, and download firmware … then you’ve just demonstrated why Apple is so popular beyond the hipster quotient. You just plug the fucking thing in, and it works. That’s hard to beat, and that’s what all these tech heads aren’t getting. Nobody, save tech heads, wants to spend hours trying to figure these things out and jump through burning hoops just to make the device work normally. It just underlines a level of quality a notch or two below what most people come to expect as standard operational procedure for any Apple product.

Can we save the iPod? I hope so, but I just don’t see it happening in the current climate of cloud hype. The Apple folks seem dead-set on driving their point home that we must all acquiesce to the cloud and their version of the future … when they’ve made a device that is just sheer perfection in terms of listening to portable music. And they should be building these things with larger drives, and switching to flash drives and putting them in the devices as flash drives grow larger and cheaper over the next few years. Doesn’t even have to be iPod Classic. I’d assume they could move forward with iPod Touches since they have larger viewing screens and people could watch movies and videos on them. The key for me is room to grow, and if I had a 320 GB device, or even a 240 GB Apple portable device, it would take me a long, long time to fill it up. It took me five years to fill up a 160 GB device that automatically had 60 GB on it, and you can throw down about another 20 GB when I went into my CD collection and went hog-wild in terms of throwing everything I wanted on the player. A device with twice the size hard drive would take me another decade to fill up, at least.

But I know this is all idle chatter. Everyone in my shoes does this – speaks it out loud, or writes it on the web, and thinks wishing publicly like this will make it so. In the mean time, I’ll face reality and wrestle with the frumpy, tank-like, pain-in-the-ass Archos player. It may be royally pissing me off, but it’s my only hope for the future right now.

Jury Duty

They got me again. Jury duty. Third time. Second time was a few years ago, sitting around a jury waiting room in Jamaica, Queens that had the exact feel of a decrepit bus station in East St. Louis. That time, I was gone in a day, not even selected. First time was in the early 90s, in the Bronx, a six-week murder trial, and I’ll get into that later.

This time, in Kew Gardens, Queens, it really got to me. I know, I should be used to metal detectors by now. But I never will be. For jury duty? Really? They were calling me there to perform a civic duty. With a court-decreed summons. Am I really going to bring in a sawed-off shotgun under my coat to randomly kill people in a jury duty waiting room?

The worst part was the guards: incredibly rude and brusque, past the point of antagonism. Barking at people. Demanding they empty their pockets, everything, not even tissues or cough drops, empty them. Really? If I leave one Halls mentholyptus in my pocket by accident, it’s going to set off … the Halls mentholyptus alarm? Assholes. Incredibly rude assholes who eyed everyone waiting in line as if they were child rapists being brought before a judge. I get summoned by the Court, to take time out my life, to perform a civic duty … and all I do is get treated like dogshit by these community college dropouts with badges who have no need to be so openly antagonistic to people who clearly aren’t criminals, who can’t be, otherwise they wouldn’t be summoned?

It really put me off, this time, really hit home how deeply abnormal this process is, how courthouses, and schools, and so many other public institutions, are now. Just as bad as anything you’ll read in 1984 … this is where we are now as a society. I doubt the rest of the country is this bad, just a perfect storm of the New York City Prick Mentality and this awful lock-down mentality we now have with places like this.

I thought about it more. Especially with schools. Most urban schools have this metal detector/guards set-up. It struck me this time in jury duty how much this felt like I was entering a prison facility: the same level of scrutiny and disdain. I put myself in the shoes of a 12-year-old kid going to a cruddy inner-city public school, his first day outside of elementary school … where every morning means walking this gauntlet of shit. Probably for good reason, too, in their case, as there are predators-in-training stalking the hallways of many of these schools.

But let’s say I’m 12 years old, a relatively good kid, not a criminal … but every day when I go to school, I’m being treated like a criminal entering a prison. What kind of mentality does that give me towards the education system? Would I even know enough that there are places in the world where being metal-detected and wanded by guys with badges is a deeply abnormal and unthinkable process to put a 12-year-old boy through, going to a school, no less? I would be raised inside this culture where the expectation was that I was already under suspicion for having done nothing. And living in a world where the expectation would be that, sooner or later, I would do something requiring all these guards with their handguns and clubs to take action against me. Why else would they be there? Presumably to protect me … but if they’re there to protect me, why are they also treating me like someone they need to be protected from? I’m not carrying a gun, or a club. Should I be if I want to be on equal footing? A grown man carrying a gun and club projects one thing to me: fear. You need to be afraid of something to arm yourself that heavily.

That would play on my mind. It played on my mind this past jury duty assignment. How fucked this next generation of kids must be if they consider this kind of daily abuse in any way “normal” … when it’s about as far from normal as you could possibly get. I had this conversation with people at work and was alarmed how many of them think this is perfectly normal behavior. It just isn’t. It’s sick, and it warps people’s minds.

They’ll keep telling us it’s all to “protect us” … but at some point, you have to ask yourself, where does it end? Many of us can remember life before these drastic measures, when you could amble up to a courthouse anywhere in America and just walk in, as opposed to feeling like you’re bringing a carton of cigarettes to an unlucky friend incarcerated in Rahway. We’re so ramped up with this bullshit that I can’t possibly see how we could ramp down again to a relatively normal life where people walked freely into schools and courthouses. The only logical progression would be for things to get worse from this point, not better.

In a sick way, this whole process, especially with schools, seems geared towards making lower and working-class kids feel more comfortable and familiar with being institutionalized, to embrace it in some sense at an early age … so they won’t mind so much when it happens for real a decade down the road. To get used to guards making them feel less human, to be taunted by people with guns, to be made to feel they have to answer to people no one should ever have to answer to.

I can only grasp how awful prison must be, if this sort of treatment is a small fraction of the discomfort and disrespect inmates are exposed to daily for years on end. (I'm assuming it goes both ways, and inmates surely treat guards the same way.) Believe me, getting treated like dogshit in a courthouse is incentive enough for me to do everything possible to not fall under the care and control of any institution. I’m sure I’d figure out how to live and survive in that environment … but I can see, through these minute glimpses, how awful and soul destroying it must be. As with any institution, be it a prison or a hospital, everyone is there to treat you as a dollar sign, whether it’s you in a hospital bed running up a six-figure bill, or you in an orange jumpsuit feeding tax dollars into prison construction and employment. I don’t want any part of either and will do whatever necessary to avoid being part of either situation.

About that earlier jury duty in the Bronx … I’ve forgotten so much about the experience. Must have been mid-90s. I found an article about the actual case. And here’s an even better article about the mass murder leading up to that revenge murder our defendant committed. Read The New York Times article as part of the entry: it gives the entire history of how this story came to be, basically a neighborhood beef amongst teenage drug dealers that exploded into this awful story of multiple corpses. I don't believe the first link mentions that the defendant from our case was in a rival drug gang struggling for dominance of that neighborhood.

I think it was because of that murder on the courthouse steps that this whole era of courthouse lockdowns began – at least that was made explicitly clear to us at the trial, that this was why getting into the Bronx County Courthouse was such an ordeal. Being part of that jury was a terrible experience, as you could imagine, but at least there was a story to tell afterwards. How many of us are exposed to that world, where teenage kids push their bounds by falling into drugs and easy money, and then not have maturity or sense enough to quietly ease out of that life after making a small fortune? In this case, petty neighborhood beefs were tossed into the mix (in this case, a teenage girl slapped in the face in public) and resulted in seven deaths over, essentially, nothing but hurt feelings. When’s the last time you shot someone for hurting your feelings?

I don’t recall being as outraged at the time over my treatment as someone being scrutinized upon entering a courthouse. Why? Because that was one case where they should have sequestered the jury completely from the public. As noted, this was a jury for a high-profile murder case. Every day, I’d look out in the crowded audience and notice the actor Sam Waterston sitting there, dapper and small in a white shirt. Little did I know he was researching his role for his stint as a District Attorney on the TV show, Law and Order. He surely got an education with that case. But every day, there’d be a parade of teenage drug gang members, some in prison uniforms, others not, giving testimony as to what they knew about this revenge killing, and how circumstances came to be that these people found themselves walking around in bullet-proof vests and killing each other execution-style in cramped apartments.

And every day … I’d see these same punks and assholes, not a dozen feet away from me, eating lunch on the courthouse steps with family and friends! Riding elevators with me. Making eye contact. As a juror, I had zero protection from these people. They knew who I was … could have followed me home, if they wanted. The Bronx is notorious for having an ass-backwards attitude on providing guilty verdicts to violent felony crimes. I think part of that is that people who live there simply know or are related to people who have done time so that they tend to let things slide when it comes to making a hard call like that. But more importantly, they’re afraid of vengeance as most of the crimes are related to drug gangs and such. There are a lot of reasons why I left the Bronx, but this realization was one of them, that I was living around people who had lowered their expectations of life to match their physical surroundings, i.e., when you know a few guys who’ve done time for felony offenses, have a relative or two in jail for stupid drug-related shit, you tend to see the world through that sort of lens, where these situations most people find soul destroying simply become part of every-day life.

And, thus, we’re back to where I started, imagining myself as a relatively innocent 12-year-old standing in front of a metal detector at the local P.S. for the first time, and treating it like it’s no big deal. It is a big deal. What it represents. What it says about the place you live. The building in which you are to learn about life, and how to live in this world. What it says about you. Who you are. Who you aren’t. Why you should be made to feel like you’ve done something wrong, when you’ve done nothing wrong. Why you’re made to feel like you’re already institutionalized, when you’re just a kid, and life is spread out in front of you, waiting for you to live it, to sense that freedom … and have that freedom empty its pockets every morning, take off its belt, pass through a metal detector, and maybe have a rent-a-cop curse it and pass a wand over then wave it through after a pat-down.

How did we get here? More importantly, how do we get out of here? Is it even possible?

So Long, Joe II

When I heard that Joe Paterno had been diagnosed with “a treatable form of” lung cancer, on top of a broken hip, I said to a few people, “He’ll be gone inside a year.”

As it turned, out he was gone much sooner, as in today. As I know from harsh personal experience, anyone that age being treated for cancer is rolling the dice, chances are the treatment itself will create conditions (pneumonia, most likely) that will kill the person rather than the cancer itself. And the doctors will shrug and ignore the fact that one of their patients just died. (At least that’s how they treated my father and us.)

Of course, this isn’t just a factory worker with four grown kids who passed on but a college football legend, saddled with a recently-tarnished image we’ve all been bludgeoned with for the past few months. I’ve pretty much said my peace on that subject in two previous posts. His passing changes nothing in that regard.

Hearing the news, I felt terrible. Sensed it was coming, but not that fast. Get ready for the armchair moralists and dogshit sports columnists to gear up their hype machines again, for more sermons on the mount from people you should trust about as far as you could throw. Writing can be a fairly enlightening and heroic profession, at times. But at other times, it presents people who aren’t good at communicating anything real, but are more than glad to infuse the culture with a type of easy, greeting-card mediocrity that so many people mistake as moral turpitude. For all the writers I’ve known, I don’t think there are any I would trust as great moralists, myself included. At least I’ll tell you as much, rather than pretend I’m wielding some magic wand that illuminates all I touch. I’m no more or less human than you are, and just as prone to getting things wrong.

People are going to remember the man however they want to. This man had a profoundly positive influence on me for decades. That sense of stressing intellectual pursuits, whatever else you do in life. In his case, he was giving free college educations to kids who were tremendous athletes. In return, those kids were given the opportunity to be part of a great college football program that brought in millions of dollars to the university. Some of those kids were so talented that they then took their skills, sharpened by him and his staff, and made their fortunes as professional football players. Some fell by the wayside, or never quite clicked with the program. Most did as noted above, got free college educations, which is nothing to scoff at, especially for impoverished kids from small towns and inner cities. And in Penn State’s case, they were openly encouraged to stay the course and graduate with a degree.

May not seem like much, but it is at that level, where those kids are treated like icons, and no doubt were to some degree at Penn State, too. But beneath the bluster, beneath the occasional flame-out and passing controversy, there was that steady line of graduates. This is Joe Paterno’s legacy, after all is said and done.

If you feel the need to tie in this awful Sandusky situation in with it, feel free. I do, too, but I keep it in perspective. Unless otherwise proven over the next few months or years, I’m going to assume that Joe did what he supposed to, report the situation to his immediate authorities, who then did nothing. I’m going to take his word for it that he didn’t really know what Sandusky was doing and had no knowledge of the 1998 investigation. If this is not the case, then now that he’s gone, it should be much easier for someone to come forward, an investigator or participant from either the 1998 case or this 2002 case, and state otherwise. My mind is surely open to that, or any, type of new knowledge and insight being shed on this case.

Even with that take on things, the Board of Regents still held him accountable and claimed the reason he was fired was because he didn’t do more in the situation. And I can surely see their point of view, given that he over-road their authority in the past and was guessing he could do it again, save no one was prepared for the media explosion when this story broke. What most people aren’t realizing is the Board of Regents is a voluntary organization; I’m not even sure if those people get paid. These are people, probably all of them alumni who want to still be part of the university, who have done pretty well for themselves in life, have successful careers in other areas, and joining the Board of Regents for their college alma mater looks good on the resume and the monument they’ve built to themselves.

People seem to think it’s some shadow organization of campus insiders pulling strings. No. It’s highly-visible alumni, and I gather many of them are going to clear out after this whole scenario, as they’re no doubt receiving a ton of grief over what they did from other alumni. I suspect that there will be some type of pardon for Joe issued by the Board over the next year or two over how we was let go. If you’re not part of the Penn State universe and having a hard time seeing that, then maybe you should grasp that there are two worlds here: the outside world, which has been a shitstorm of accusation and shame, and the Penn State world, where Paterno’s legacy over the past five or so decades looms large over so many things on that town, campus and state.

Like so many alumni, I’m part of both worlds. Far away from that Penn State world. I graduated, and aside from spending my summer after graduation there, then revisiting the place once for Arts Festival in the early 90s, I’ve had virtually nothing to do with the campus. They got enough money from me the first time around, so I’m not a donator, especially when I see what they’re charging kids now. I feel no burning need to attach myself to the university, but I do take some sort of pride in associating myself with the college, and am grateful for the time I spent there, as those few years opened me up in innumerable ways that I’m still learning from today.

Paterno and his legacy are tied into that feeling. Not his myth. His legacy … what he did … not what we think he did (or didn’t) do. I’m with a lot of people on this – he should have done more when that incident was reported to him. Everyone should have done more. They didn’t, and this thing turned into a shitstorm of epic proportions that brought down his career and damaged the program he spent a lifetime building. The sting for Joe was being fired after being a coach there since the early 1950s. Since the early 1950s. Imagine working for a place that long, rising so high, achieving so much … and one day, you’re fired over the phone … for doing what you were supposed to do according to school policy? It seems to me that had he contacted, say, the state police on his own back in 2002, doing so could have just as easily led to him being fired for ignoring school policy on handling such situations.

Either way, he wasn’t going to win this one. And if there’s one thing I learned watching Penn State football, you absorb the losses. Some of them stay with you the rest of your days, but you absorb them. You live with them. I still don’t know what happened in this situation, and I suspect Joe’s passing will have little to do with how this scenario plays out. In his last interview, a few days before he passed, he seemed to give a pretty straightforward account about what he did and why he did it. Either you believe him, or you don’t. There will now be plenty of time for anyone who wants to come forward and either prove or disprove what he claimed.

I feel awful today, as does any Penn State football fan. Most people don’t get to choose when they die, and I’m sure Joe would have chosen to live longer and try to clear his name in all this. But I don’t think there’s anything more he could have done, save to reiterate what he said in his last interview and stand by his words. He deserved a better way out, but as I could see with my father, chances are we will all deserve better ways out. My point being, there’s no easy way out of here, and if you think there is, you’ve been reading too many glowing obituaries where it seems the person was lifted to heaven by a gathering of angels, after the deceased muttered famous last words for his loved ones to live by, and they, bearing candles and warm, understanding smiles, watched him float free of all worldly cares to a better place.

No. Shit happened. Did not go according to plan. But it’s done. It’s for the rest of us to pick ourselves up and prepare for whatever life throws at us next. I’ll miss the man immensely, for those things he taught me in my life.