Archive for July, 2009

A&M chapter thirteen

Let’s talk a little more about Barncard.  Barney.  SQB.  Stephen Quinn Barncard.  Resident Genius.

Barney designed and implemented so much crazy cool shit at A&M studios, it’s safe to say he was taken for granted by almost all of us.  What it must have been like for a man so bright, to serve at the discretion of men so much dimmer, is completely outside my ability to fathom.  When I think about it, I’m a little embarrassed.

Understand, it’s not a scenario that was exclusive to him, there were many great minds in that place.  Ultimately, as well as I knew him, he stands out, a little more of an enigma than the rest.

Friendly, gregarious even, and never patronizing.  Undeniably odd though.  A little crazy even.

He seemed happy and was so goddamn smart, pretty much above reproach.  Nobody ever really fucked with Barney.  Not as far as I know.  Sometimes he’d say something he clearly thought was funny, he had a laugh not unlike a little kid’s, kinda gleeful and unselfconscious; a little shrill for a man in possession of such a rich baritone.  About a third of the the time I’d smile and chuckle, not having any idea what he’d said or meant.

It sounded to me like, “A little like folding soup on hot summer day inside an igloo, eh?”

The Star Trek door leading to the control room in Studio A.  Push of a button and the the heavy airlock door whisked aside.  Kind of a pain in the ass sometimes but cool as shit nonetheless.

Tape copy.  A hundred plus Tascam 122MKIII cassette decks controlled and completely synchronized by a primitive late eighties Mac.  A listening system that allowed for the operator to hear a few seconds from each individual deck and thus be able to pull a bad copy in the process.  Oscilloscopes to see phase in case you couldn’t hear it.  I loved the dance of the cathode ray tube.  An integral step in teaching potential engineers how to listen and develop an attention span.

“They had good three motor transports and three heads, and were easier to align that other prosumer decks. But the deal making feature for me was that the decks could be operated by a direct connection rather than by infrared. That allowed the use of simple transistor circuits to drive the remote control inputs of the decks. At the end there were over 135 decks in the room; it was built for 156. There were 13 decks in each rack because that’s all that would fit. It would have been nicer digitally to have 16 decks in a rack.” -SQB
The FM radio station complete with Orban Optimod brick wall limiters.  You could listen to your mix on your own car radio in the parking lot, or a fully restored candy apple red ’57 Chevy sitting out back.  What the FCC didn’t know, didn’t hurt them.

Then there was Echo Central.  The Inner Sanctum.  Barney’s office.  A windowless room in the upper regions of A&M studios behind the second floor Studio A and B lounges that housed backup hard drives for the four computerized automated consoles in studios B, D, Mix and eventually A, once the legendary Neve was retrofitted with Massenburg flying faders.  The epicenter of research and development for A&M studios.

It was among the quietest and most peaceful places to sleep in the wee hours.  There was a back room, sort of a sepulcher, most didn’t know about.  I thought of it as a secret sarcophagus.  I enjoyed many a nap back there.  I might be imagining this but I seem to remember a way through the ceiling to the ancient catwalks above.  A few ceiling tiles pushed aside and you were in the era of Perry Mason.  It was filmed there, in that space, decades before.  You could see into the B lounge from up there.  A window that from the lounge looked on nothing, or so people thought.

Barney had devised a technology where all of the studio’s five live chambers and some 13 or 15 EMT plates could be assigned to any individual studio patch bay via ELCO connectors and then show up on a television channel so that each of the five control rooms could see which echo units were assigned to each room and which ones were available.

Red room, white room etc.

A live chamber is essentially a small, highly reflective room with two transducers.  A speaker and a microphone.  Pump signal through the speaker and it’s reflections are available via microphone.  I believe the White Room was a coincident or XY stereo pair, whereas the Red Room was mono.  There were three smaller chambers above C as well.

Roland The Headless Thompson and I experimented recording various acoustic guitars, nylon and steel string, in those live chambers with mixed, but always interesting results.

EMT plates are archaic technology as well.  Again, two transducers.  A small speaker at one end of a huge metal plate and a “pickup” at the other end of said plate, all housed in a wooden box about the size of a grand piano.  We had something like fifteen of them, all hanging in a two story brick building behind the studio.

In both cases, simple methodology and crude technology to create very unique echo on recordings before digital was even a word in pro audio.  Think Beatles, Stones and Elvis.  By the time I became a sorcerer’s apprentice, live chambers and EMT plates were a luxury very few studios in the world could afford real estate for, much less the logistics.  We were spoiled.

To switch or reassign any of them meant  trekking up to the Inner Sanctum, walking through a blue haze of quality pot smoke and physically moving the the ELCO connector  from one patch bay to another.  Barncard may or may not have acknowledged the interloper, depending on what he was working on.  It would then instantaneously appear on the television screen showing the patch point it could be accessed from in any given control room.

The only thing the Inner Sanctum lacked was test tubes and Bunsen burners.

Genius.

I confess, as a runner/janitor at A&M studios, I had keys to just about everything, including Barney’s Inner Sanctum.  Later on, I had legitimate reason to enter, but before that, under the auspices of emptying the trash……. you see where I’m going with this.

Barney could usually be counted on to at least leave a roach or two in an ashtray and we came to learn he kept his stash in empty quarter or half inch reel boxes back in the sepulcher.

Air conditioning is a very big deal in recording studios because the equipment generates an amazing amount of heat.  The temperature in a control room would go from 65 degrees to 95 or a 100 in fifteen or twenty minutes when the air went down.  This, in turn, effects the audio gear as well as musical instruments in a hurry.  Guitars go out of tune, drum heads go flaccid etc.

Just so happens, the Inner Sanctum shared ducting with the control rooms of both A and B.  Whenever we did bong rips in Echo Central, the Inner Sanctum, the inhabitants of both control rooms could smell it.  It was obvious, like green pungent gas.  Barney didn’t seem to care, he didn’t have to.  We did.  So upon locating his cache, we’d often take it to a safer place, like the Secret Pizza Lounge also known as Berg’s Green Retreat, far higher up in the building and the only other way to access the the weird upper regions of this recording complex built inside the the antiquated shell of the original Chaplin sound stage.  Far above and behind the tech shop, the speaker loft and removed from the elaborate air conditioning system.  Hot as fuck in the summer but the monotony was broken by getting high.

A happy sweat at three A.M.

We’d climb down the catwalks and ladders, consciousness altered enough to afford patience for clean up after rock bands, washing their dishes and schlepping their trash.

At the pleasure of judge and jury, a quick anecdote:

One Saturday afternoon, not too long into my time at A&M recording studios, I was working the front office phones when a battery of fire trucks arrived in front of the main gate on La Brea, sirens blazing.  The front guard shack called to say there was a fire alarm going off full tilt inside the studio somewhere.  Let them in I said.  What could I do?

Seconds later, eight or ten anxious firemen stood before me in heavy uniform while their captain explained that a smoke alarm was going off in the building and they couldn’t leave until they verified the location of the alarm wasn’t actually on fire.

What could I do?

Somehow, they were able to pinpoint the specific location of the alarm.  Echo Central.  The Inner Sanctum.  Fuck me.  I called up and there was no answer.  Anybody sitting up there blazing away on a Saturday wasn’t gonna answer the phone.  I knew that, but I had to try.  I stalled by paging another runner to cover the phones before I escorted them up.

I guy we called Foo Paux answered the page and I explained the situation to him and told him to keep ringing Echo Central.  Meantime, I led the phalanx of firefighters behind me up the back way explaining how we couldn’t interrupt the recording sessions in in either A or B…….trying to buy time.

We started down the back hallway to Echo Central and we could all smell it.  What the hell I figured, it’s not like they’re cops.  They began to giggle and chuckle behind me.  Still, I was nervous because I couldn’t know what we’d find upon my unlocking that door.

At any given time, this place could erupt into a carnival/circus with naked chicks, drugs and mayhem from hell to breakfast.  It was an insane place to work.  On weekends, the runners were expected to mitigate the inevitable craziness or at least keep it from spilling on to the streets of Hollywood.

Any reputable recording studio of that era served simultaneously as a creative environment for artists and a sanctuary for rockstars to indulge themselves without concern for the outside world and mere pedestrian consequences.  Our job was to encourage and foment the idea that within our walls, they were not subject to society’s rules, judgements or persecutions.

An unspoken but concrete ethic.

Early on you become sensitive to sound, if you’re serious at all about making a living at manipulating it.  The heavy feet of so many battle outfitted men behind me coming to such an abrupt stop startled me.  Two or three at least carried axes.

Silence.  The provenance of any real recording studio.

The sound of the keys in my hand was like a chandelier crashing on concrete.  I unlocked and opened the door.

Slow motion in real time.

There sat Randy Wine, a fat hog leg of a joint in his hand.  The atmosphere blue green from smoke, his feet up on a workbench, slit eyes like road maps and a shit eating grin on his face.

The troops behind me began to laugh out loud.  “Ain’t no fire here man”, he said while exhaling another thick blue cloud.  Behind me they began to  lose it.  I stood for a second, not sure what to do.  Randy gave me a what the fuck gesture with both hands and I shut the door and turned around.  They were laughing so hard they couldn’t look at me.

I asked if they could find the way out.  They assured me they could.

On top of it all, Barney was a shit hot engineer.  His acoustic guitar sounds were crazy good.  His legacy stretches from Crosby, Stills and Nash, to Nilsson, New Riders of The Purple Sage and The Grateful Dead.
Barney would eventually hire me to engineer in his stead.  No greater compliment.  I was paid handsomely, put up in a nice suite in Ann Arbor Michigan and did well enough to be asked back a few times.  The artist afforded me room service and an open tab at the hotel bar as well as room service.  Nothing ever came of it.  The material wasn’t bad but it wasn’t timely.  I had a swell time and did a good job.  My acoustic guitar sounds weren’t as good as Barney’s but I held my own.  They were bright and shiny.

Drinks for my friends.

Furthermore

So Ann Coultergeist goes on Faux news and says Lou Dobbs was right on racism, I mean immigration, but wrong on the Birther movement.  Dobbs is saying he’s not a Birther but merely wants proof.  Nevermind that the issue is less than silly and Dobbs is at least willfully complicit by irresponsibly shining a mainstream media spot on it.

Duh.

The punchline is that Coulter is in a shitstorm over the whole thing.  The far right whackaloons are marching on her cottage with torches and pitchforks.  I love it.  What does it say about these people if they’re too nuts for Coulter?  Ignorance is bliss.  If you’re retarded, do you really know you’re retarded?

This is rich.

Somebody on Hardball put it pretty succinctly.  I’ll paraphrase.  When the river is low, sand bars and rocks at the bottom are exposed to the light of day.  The Republican river is low.  I may have put a more than poetic flourish on it than was originally intended but that’s my job and I’m sure you get the point.  The GOP is experiencing a drought.  With that drought comes famine.  A famine of ideas, leadership, intellectual honesty and common sense.  The fabric of commonality, the fish net if you will, is rent asunder and the carp are left to flop and writhe and wheeze amid the sand and stones while baking in the hot summer sun.

I can’t help it, that visual makes me a little sad.

Ahhh, but then the lunatic fringe marches ever onward, if not forward.  Not forward at all.

Through nefarious effort of various obfuscationists, I may have just invented a new word, the elderly are being led to believe they will be evaluated on their individual likelihood to die and whether it’s cost effective for the government to pay for cost saving measures based on that likelihood.  Some are even expecting government employees to literally visit their homes to determine how they would prefer to die according to mortality statistics and actuarial tables with their specific affliction as a determining factor.

Think I’m kidding?

“The Republicans have a better solution that won’t put the government in charge of people’s health care……… and is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government”  -Virginia Foxx (R-NC) on the floor of the House of Representatives

“A lot of people are gonna die……..this program of of government option that’s being touted as this panacea, the savior of allowing people to have quality health care at an affordable price is gonna kill people” -Paul Broun (R-GA) on the floor of the House of Representatives

I think he might be saying quality affordable care is impossible unless we kill some of us off.

What new devilry is this?  They have either been led to believe by lobbyists that it’s all true and that would make them gullible idiots, or they are so deep in the pockets thereof that their chief concerns are money and power.  Either way, it is profoundly fucked up.

And as Rachel Maddow points out, all this morbid retarded fucking bullshit starts with and is propagated by the likes of America’s preeminent Human Shitsmear, Rush fucking Limbaugh.  They are taking their talking points from this drug addled, lying and thrice divorced douchebag.

The GOP needs immediate health care.  The GOP needs a surgeon for it’s tumor.

But wait, there’s more, lets listen!

“This is very dangerous.  We, in Michigan have already fought back an attempted assisted suicide several years ago and yet you see that the people who support this are trying to use this bill to advance this agenda.” -Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI)

Really, what?

Wait.  It get’s better.  Let’s listen!

“We’ve been battling this socialist health care, the nationalization of health care, that is going to absolutely kill senior citizens.  They’ll put them on lists and force them to die early because they won’t get the treatment as quickly as they need… Once the government pays for your health care, they have every right to tell you what to eat, what you drink, how to exercise, where you live…Any time you have economic chaos, people are always willing to give up their liberty to get economic stability” -Louie Gohmert (R-TX)

Sheezus.  I really like the word ‘diphthong’ don’t you?  It’s meaning is so nebulous.  A sliding vowel.  Sorry, let’s keep moving.

He then goes on to compare the quest for reasonable and affordable health care for American citizens to the aspirations of Hitler and Mao.

This asstard is a genius.  Buy his free book.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this is simply the most voluminous wad of shit any single agency, much less, American political party, has ever attempted to shove down your ignorant neck.  If you buy into a single aspect of it, you are stupid and worthless.  You probably still think the Iraq war was a great idea.

Ask yourself what this is about.  The answer is Fisher Price.  Money.  Each one of these shriveled dicks is gagging on giant pharmacuetical cock and loving it.  Can’t get enough of that huge milky cock.  These fucks.  These fucking fucks, are nothing but avaricious politicians who’s sole concern when they wake up everyday is money and power.  They don’t give a mad fuck about you.  They don’t want you decent tax paying citizens to be able to cross violent car crashes or brutal insidious cancer off your list of things to worry about because they’ve got eyes on a new boat or hookers in another city.

They lay their heads each night on pillows wrapped in high thread count sheaths and pray for your continued gullibility.  Oh, and more pharmaceutical cock.  Milky cash and medicine spewing cock.

This, is the exact nature of the battle being waged on your behalf by your elected representatives.  These are actual statements mouthed by the lying thieves you elected and trust with your best interests and every single goddamn one of them is a Republican.  I’m not here to tell you Democrats are much better because they aren’t.  At best they are spineless pussies and supine in contrast to the snarling overfed neoconservative hounds wandering the moors in search of weakened foul exactly like you.

God helps those that help themselves.  I don’t believe in your God but you better believe in this one thing or we all get nothing.  Nothing.  The richest country on earth will deny you treatment that will save your life when disease is acute enough to kill you if we don’t make this happen now.  It won’t even be your country, it’ll be your insurance company.

Here comes the hard part.  The irony.

You think the horror they preach isn’t possible?  Get sick now.  What they are screaming about has already happened.  Fourteen thousand a day losing any chance at affording a life threatening occurrence.    It’s a right, not a privilege and as the richest nation on earth we deserve it.

What these fucks would have you believe is worse case scenario, already is.  If you have insurance, you assume you’re insured.  You get sick and it’s fifty fifty at best.  Your insurance provider can and will walk away from you and there isn’t a damn thing you can do.

Now, there is no bill yet, but why are they so scared?  Simple things like no discrimination against pre-existing conditions etc……

Let it begin.  It won’t be perfect but it’s easier to fix a tire once the car is on the road rather than having to reinvent tires all over again.

We spend more than ten times our nearest competitor state on WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION and we pay for all of it, there’s plenty of room and money for us to be taken care of when our darkest days come.  And they will come.  For each of us, they will come.  Wanna be scared?  Be scared of that, because it’s inevitable.

Fuck Israel, fuck Iraq and fuck Afghanistan.  There is plenty of filthy lucre and it’s ours.  All ours.  Time to stand up and tell them how to spend our goddamn money.  Our money.  Our country.

” We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

So be it.

Drinks for my friends.

Pissing in the wind

Today the House passed H. Res. 593, a resolution “recognizing and celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the entry of Hawaii into the Union as the 50th State,” contains this provision: “Whereas the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, was born in Hawaii”.  -Think Progress

Our first Hawaiian President.  Pineapple pizza for everyone.  I favor this particular fruit on pizza as in contrasts so well in both flavor and texture with ham and cheese.  Ever grilled it?  A little teriyaki, A nice dry rose’ and Bob’s your uncle.

Although it’s true that resolutions are for all intents and purposes toothless, the symbolism and import of this one is pretty obvious.  Interesting that CNN has no mention of it on its website.  The network itself is experiencing a very specific malaise by the name of Lou Dobbs.  A border line bigot (pun intended) who’s recently colored outside the lines by lending credence to the elaborate falsehood propagated by the “Birthers”.  A collective of flat earthers who’s entire impetus is the spurious contention that Barack Obama is not a citizen of the United States.  Dickheads, who make the swiftboaters appear sane in comparison.

So egregious, racist, irresponsible and desperate are these Birthers, that they have become a boat anchor for the GOP as it claws and scratches for relevance.  A party that pines for the days when the cacophony of derisive laughter didn’t disturb the waking hours and interrupt the sleeping ones.  As little as twelve months ago they would have embraced these dickheads and fomented their baseless nonsense in the interest of business as usual in context of slash and burn politics.

Today, 158 Republicans voted aye, not a single nay vote and Bill O’Reilly debunked it saying “It was easy, the State of Hawaii sent us a copy.”

Not without a whimper do they go however.  I give you Michele “crazy eyes” Bachmann (R-MN):  “BACHMANN: Mr. Speaker? I object to the vote on the grounds that a quorum is not present and make a point of order that a quorum is not present. […]”  -Think Progress

Michele ““We’re Running Out Of Rich People In This Country” Bachmann is one stupid bitch.   “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter…….” -Huffington Post

Except it actually occurred under Ford.  She’s sure carbon dioxide isn’t harmful because it’s a “natural gas” and from “nature”.  I adore her.  Vicious little cupcake without a clue.

Together, Bachmann, Dobbs and Palin represent the best case right wing Christians have for their argument against evolution.  Despite gravity even, they demonstrate an uncanny ability for failing upward.

It speaks volumes about American zeitgeist that we even allow such poison to pollute our sociopolitical discourse, that these clowns are elevated to a platform where they are listened to by anyone.  A special kind of sickness, unique to Americans.  The same kind that allows us to tolerate the impeachment of a President for sexual indiscretion.  The very same that makes us reluctant to investigate and prosecute a former President and his Vice for war crimes.  An insidious brand of false entitlement and judgmental narcissism that allows some of us to believe we have every right to estimate the worth of another without regard for facts and before we’ve walked any distance in their shoes.

It works both ways.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was more right than wrong when he said “Goddamn America”.

Here’s my new thing.  When dining Mexican, I’ve always felt a bit guilty when the customarily ubiquitous tortilla chips arrive.  I never eat them.  I’m not big on the free salsa.  Lately I’ve been taking a lime from the salsa bar, squeezing it over the chips and sprinkling a little salt on them.

You’ve just paid five dollars for a five seventy five show.

Drinks for my friends.

A&M chapter twelve

There I was, actually engineering on a KISS record.  Garth as head engineer and Eddie Kramer of Hendrix fame producing.  So what if I was flying in explosions and applause, eventually I recorded Paul’s lead vocal for Detroit Rock City.  I used an SM58 and encouraged Mr. Stanley to go handheld in an effort to preserve context and vibe.  KISS Alive III………see, there’s no such thing as live records anymore.

KISS records had long since become low budget productions in the interest of maximizing profit.  Gene and Paul may very well be rock icons, but they are businessmen first and foremost and they never pretend to apologize for that.  Therefore, respect.

Real live records were pretty much before my time and probably yours.  Johnny Cash, “Live in Folsom Prison” circa 1968.

I ran into Paul Stanley a few months ago at the 7-11.  It’s right next door you know.  He looked at me while we stood in line and I told him quietly that I’d engineered some of his vocals for Kiss Alive III, he smiled and said something about there being no such thing as live records anymore.  I wished him a goodnight.  Nice guy.

The clerk behind the counter had no idea.

Eddie Kramer is an entirely different story.  I’ll do my best to be succinct; as I typed that, I knew it to be a lie.

His ego was a blimp.  His talent was a cherry tomato water balloon fashioned from an extra small prophylactic.  His integrity was larval and his personality was heartburn.  A loathsome man who kept whispering in my ear about mixing unreleased Hendrix tracks.  I can just imagine him doing the same thing to every up and coming engineer he’d ever been in a control room with over the last two decades.  A sociopath with tendencies latent I can only guess at.  An egomaniacal asshole.  A man I’d swing on today if he said hello to me in a mall.

I’d like to put a very fine point on this.  Eddie Kramer is, if he’s still alive, a shitty, stupid and callow human.  The kind of man my father would call a “shitass” and then find reason to beat the crap out of.  A miserable and misanthropic little prick with no idea what everyone in his life thinks of him because he can’t be bothered.  He had no business inside a studio like A&M.  He, of all people I encountered in that environment for over eight years, had the shallowest of reasons to be inside that place.  A bullshit legacy that was far more about luck than talent.  Right place at the right time and absent a modicum of ability nonetheless.

From the guy who took care of the giant saltwater aquarium to Buddy the piano tuner.  From the runners to Shelly Yakus, no single person ever entered that monolithic front door with less integrity, less character or less credibility than Eddie Kramer, music’s most odoriferous charlatan.

The scene:

Here I am engineering for Garth and Eddie on a goddamn live KISS record.  I lied to Paul Stanley before we did the Detroit Rock City vocal by telling him I couldn’t remember the lyrics.   In order to “punch” or drop in and out of record by the millisecond for a vocal on an analog machine, you had to know the lyrics and melody or at least have a map because you did it live and in the moment.  Not at all like today.  He graciously wrote them out for me.  Somewhere I still have them.  Yep Sean, they’re still yours unless I end up homeless.

By the way, Gene and Paul, exceptionally nice guys.  Bright, clever, very funny and about as anti-asshole as  rockstars can be.  I thoroughly enjoyed working with them.  That it was fun, is no understatement.

I knew what sort of animal Eddie was by that point.  We learned far more than engineering in a place like A&M.  He was hapless without knowing it.  No skill, no acumen, no ear and completely clueless about the then contemporary technology.  His assistants and engineers spent considerable time each day after he left cleaning up his boneheaded mistakes and fixing his retarded, ill advised contributions to whatever project he had a hand in.  The comedy is that his ears were of such cheap and tawdry tin, he’d arrive the next day and never hear the difference.  He never suspected a thing.  Talk about an ego.

Eddi Kramer made his living taking credit for what everyone around him did to keep him from looking the fool he was.  Look under narcissist in the dictionary.  Guess who’s pictured.

I was smart enough to play along.  I curried favor, did the best job I could and even pretended to be excited about mixing his lost Hendrix tracks with him.  I knew he was a douchebag of the highest possible order.  In a place like A&M, you became accustomed to wizards and sorcerers.  The best of the best.  Eddie Kramer could not qualify for girl scout in that arena.

Look under hack.

I’d come to the studio on one of my precious days off to ensure the transfer of tapes, notes, documentation and gear from Studio C to the Mix Room went smoothly.  I was there to answer any questions and assist in any way I could.  I had done this for one reason.  Garth Richardson.

After a few hours and double and triple checking that all track sheets and documentation were in the right boxes and everything was as organized and idiot proof as I could make it……..dark clouds eclipsed the sun.

Luther Vandross and his engineer Ray Bardani were doing vocals and mixing across the hall in Studio D.  For some reason they were there in The Mix Room that afternoon.  Luther was a very nice and gentle man and so was his Engineer/producer Ray.  I had huge respect for Ray, he was a wizard.  Luther always brought a couple real video arcade games with him.  Runners and techs played them until dawn.  More often than not drunk or high or both.

I have stories about Luther but that’s another day.

Of course, Gene and Paul were there too.

I was about to leave when Eddie asked me to throw up a quarter inch reel on an ATR and find something he remembered as being funny.  All humor and light, he was attempting to entertain the assembled.  I wasn’t familiar with the reel he was asking for but more than happy to do my part for Eddie’s burlesque.

It took me a minute but I located the reel he was asking for and threaded it.  The map in the box wasn’t very clear and I wondered if he wasn’t sure what he was looking for.  A few minutes of trying to locate what he wanted and I started to sweat.

He started by saying things like there was a rookie in the room.  He laughed and suggested I read the label on the front of the box.  He went on to announce there was an idiot at the controls.  He wondered aloud what was to be expected from a simple “teaboy”.

I told him I wasn’t sure what he was looking for and it didn’t appear to be on this reel.

It was then he abruptly shoved me aside spitting words like asshole and fucker.

For the record, I’m not a violent guy.  I haven’t been in a fistfight since my early twenties.

I stood behind him with no choice but to feel and look foolish.  He began to stab at the controls maniacally, cursing and yelling ever louder.  A child’s tantrum building.  He started to stomp and scream.  Somewhere in the course of his volcano erupting, I saw that he’d reset the tape counter in the middle of the reel.  The sketchy map was now useless.  He pounded the machine in shrill frustration, stepped back and demanded I find what he was looking for all while calling me names and insulting me.

The room was silent.  Nobody looking anywhere but down.  Like an elevator after someone had farted.  Without saying anything and realizing what he’d done, I stepped to the machine and began to rewind the reel to the top so I could reset the counter.  It was then he exploded.

“It’s not at the beginning you fucking amateur!”

To be honest, I don’t remember what he said or rather, screamed after that.  It’s all a blur.  I can tell you it was the absolute worst, most invective, vituperative vitriol that had ever been directed at me in my entire life.

Stunned.

Surreal.

I was looking around for who he was talking to.  This pathetically ponytailed halitosis of a human was looking and screaming at me.  Ferocious indignation swarmed in my chest like furious bees.  My fists balled into hammers.  A career ending paroxysm was coming like a locomotive.  Fight or flight and my brain had seized on pounding this little limey shit in front of me into bloody unconsciousness.

I was going to hit him.  I was going to bash his fucking brains in.  I was going to kick his petite and lifeless body over and over.

And there was a hand on my shoulder.  “Mikey”, he said softly.  I turned slowly and there stood Garth.  He wrinkled his nose a little and pushed his glasses up.  “Mikey”, he said again and tilted his head to the left, towards the door to the hall.  He followed me out and I turned to him.  I was beside myself with anger and humiliation.  I tried to talk but there were no words.  With his hands at his sides he said to me, “Forget it, you didn’t do anything wrong.  Don’t worry about it.  Go back to Studio C and wait for me.”

I waived my arms and my mouth was open.  “Go”, he said.

Not a short walk between Mix and C and a lot longer on that day.  I sat in the rolling chair behind the console and shook with rage while my eyes leaked tears.  No one had ever spoken to me like that in my life.  I’d never been so embarrassed.  I’d nearly shit myself in desperate confusion.

I had my head in my hands, elbows on the console when I heard Garth enter the machine room behind me.  He asked if I was okay.  I don’t think I answered.  The entire time he spoke to me, I don’t believe I said a word.  I have to paraphrase what he said.  He assured me it was no big deal.  He told me an idiot like Eddie Kramer would never go to my superiors and make trouble for me because he was far too spineless and had a chronic reputation for the kind of behavior I’d just been on the receiving end of.  He told me that in the unlikely event Kramer attempted any such thing, that he, Garth, would intervene on my behalf and promised I had nothing to worry about.

His advice to me was to go home, or maybe a bar, and forget it ever happened.  The only thing anyone in that room anyone would remember about today he said, was just how big of an asshole and a child Eddie Kramer was.  You are a pro he said.  You didn’t hit him.  Walk it off.

Twice his size, I could have killed him before anyone pulled me away.

Mark Harvey joked with me about it the next day.  Told me no one else needed to know about it and reminded me that Eddie Kramer’s reputation proceeded him.  And that was pretty much it.

When Eddie and I passed each other in the hall in the days and weeks following, he wouldn’t even look at me.  Coward.

Thank you Garth.  You were and still are I’m sure, one of the best ones.  A good man indeed.

Drinks for my friends.

A&M chapter eleven

Meet Garth Richardson.

Garth was the senior Canadian.

A viciously competitive ping pong virtuoso with a devastating serve, a pronounced paunch and male pattern baldness.  Glasses and a baseball cap with some hockey logo.  I don’t believe I ever saw him lose.  He sure cleaned my clock whenever I was bored enough to have my ass handed to me.  I grew up with a ping pong table.  I was lucky to return his goddamn knuckle ball serve.

Talented, a big heart, funny, friendly and smart.  He was quite good to me.  You’ll see.

An immensely accomplished record producer and engineer who managed to eclipse his legendary father, Jack Richardson of Nimbus 9, The Guess Who and “These Eyes”, in the universe of recording arts.  He produced the first Rage Against The Machine record, arguably their best.  Good enough for me.  Always on the curve and usually ahead of it.  A class act and a good guy.

Years later, while I was mixing a project at the the deceased Frank Zappa’s house, Dweezil Zappa revealed to me how Tom Morello managed the signature  rhythm riff on “Killing In The Name”.  The second half of it was a full octave lower in the same key.  I’d always assumed it was a punch after he’d tuned down, but Morello did it with an octave pedal.  Duh.

Garth looked at me on the morning of the first day of the first gig I ever did with him and said in all seriousness, “Mikey, if you do nothing else on this session, I want you to set it up so that every time I hit rewind or stop on the multitracks, the audio from the hockey game comes up.”

I ran a noisegate off the sync head from the smpte time code track on 24, consistent amplitude and frequency.  The sync head gave me fifty five milliseconds of lead time before the playback head.  Enough to drive a truck through.  I patched into the trigger of a Drawmer gate, set it to duck, and brought it up on a fader at the end of the console near the patch bay so I could have access to it.  I ran the hockey audio through the gate, then I strapped another gate across the insert to close while the mix was playing with the same trigger off a mult.  Kinda the same chain but in reverse.  I still took care to mute it when we were printing.

Took me about five minutes to figure out and implement.

Garth smiled and asked for it in stereo.

I fucked up a lot but I think Garth and his engineer Joe liked me after that very first gig.  These guys were self sufficient.  They didn’t need a genius, just somebody to change the linens and help flip the mattress.

What I learned from Garth was largely by example.  Etiquette and politics.  He was a producer and I was an assistant to his engineer, Joe Barresi.  Joe has become a star in his own right: The Melvins, Queens of The Stoneage, Kyuss, Tool and Bad Religion.  Joe was a soft spoken and understated funny motherfucker.  At one point I was dating a redhead and showed him a picture.  His eyes lit up and he smiled.  “Firepie” he said softly through a slight grin. I’m grateful to have known and worked with him.  We were born on the exact same day, 02/07/65.  Technique and chops I stole from Joe.  Class and manners too.

Garth always had an exceptional ear for good engineers.  Stan Katayama and Joe Barresi for example.

Garth has a fairly pronounced stutter that seemed to come and go at random.  In my mind’s eye I see him jolly and hardworking.  Very funny and somewhat paternal, even to Randy and Bill.  He liked being Dad.  On holidays there was always whiskey for your coffee.

We pulled an all-nighter in B once, we were firing and printing snare samples and kept having phase problems between the original and the sample.  I remember looking at the the scope and seeing it 180 degrees out on one hit and almost phase locked on the next.  Frustrating.  We could hear it plain as day.

Around midnight Garth ordered roasted garlic pizza from this place up in Laurel Canyon.  He knew exactly what he was doing.  As soon as the pie arrived, he said with a smirk, “Mikey, I apologize in advance”.  It was delicious.  For a solid five hours we carpet bombed the control room with a prodigious volume of pungent garlic flatulence that had the runners entering with Lysol and makeshift face masks to clean up.  We joked about the air changing from blue to green.  We didn’t dare light a match for fear of combustion of the copious amount of methane.  An air locked control room and there were complaints from the hallways.  We  giggled with adolescent glee and morbid satisfaction.

His production credit often reads “GGGarth Richardson, a self deprecating nod at his stutter.

There was a young woman named Patricia Sullivan with a speech impediment somewhat more severe than Garth’s.  I called her Miss Ricia.  She was a mastering apprentice.  A different kind of engineering sorcery that suited her demeanor better than the testosterone fueled boys club of wanna be console jockeys.  Beautiful inside and out, she possessed a serenity and wisdom that I often wondered at.  She was calm and peace in an absolute maelstrom.

My point is this, an incidental thing like a stammer becomes pretty much invisible in the presence of of such genuine humanity.  It wasn’t until I remembered Garth’s affliction that I was reminded of Miss Ricia’s.  I was only reminded of Garth’s when I remembered his album credits.  When I hear his voice in my head today, I don’t hear the stutter.

I’m not sure by what authority, but Garth made me an honorary Canadian at one point.  He teased me that my assistant engineer credit on an the L7 record, “Hungry For Stink” would be either Demo King or Donut King.  I dared him and was a little disappointed to see my actual name spelled correctly when it was released.

These guys, these Canadians, Randy, Garth and Bill, all still inhale and exhale music, engineering and the production thereof everyday.  Garth has a school with producing legend Bob Ezrin (Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”), Nimbus School of Recording Arts.  Randy and Bill have very successful careers and are making God Thumping good sound as you read this.

I have much more to say about Garth, but this chapter is done.

Next up is the story of how Garth was able to prevent me from beating the shit out of Eddie Kramer in front of Luther Vandross, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons while I was actually engineering on a KISS record.

Drinks for my friends.

Sicker than a dog

I’m not gonna look this up because it’s stuck in my head.  Some 75% of Americans want health care reform anon.

This is about as popular an issue gets in America, as at least a quarter of us are retarded, misguided, rich or willfully ignorant.  They kill horses don’t they?

I love that phrase.  Willfully ignorant.  I made it up for my own self but it’s a likely coupling so I’m sure I’d read it somewhere, then one day I summoned and it became mine.  Non exclusive of course.

Yet congress and their convoluted committees scramble, and media is so complicit it’s pissing kerosene onto the politics thereof as opposed to shining the spot on the humanity of it.  How important it is for the individual as well as the whole.  An equitable system in the world’s richest country and the only one without it.  The promise of helping the economy and by giving the middle class a little more discretionary cash by simply reducing what it costs to protect a family.

Now that’s a tax cut.

Taxing the rich.  Yep, they that had largess heaped upon by the last administration might now be called upon to put a little paper in the pot instead of nickels and slugs.  Oh my God it’s socialism!  You people are killing me.  Teabaggers and racists.  Stupid is as stupid does.

Big important stuff that is nothing more than a goddamn pinata on the nightly news.  They are creating a degree of drama that is understandable given the short attention span proscenium beneath which they are forced to enact and pontificate, but this shit is important and their looseness with the football is inexcusable.

What the fuck is going on here?  Ratings and revenue.  Our own damn fault at the end of the day.

It never stops being about our own stupidity.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing.  The tremendous pressure brought to bear on already spineless elected bureaucrats behind virtually the same proscenium.  Again, the asshats in Congress playing inexcusably loose with the ball.

Four lobbyists for every elected member of the legislative branch.  Three quarters of the people wanting what they don’t understand will be a bloody beatdown on industries from insurance to pharmaceutical.  The big boys besides energy and military industrial.  The Democrats pissing themselves.  A signpost ahead.  No Walking In The Park.

I need to wade in and study the minutiae further but we don’t really have a bill yet.  I was hoping to read a bill.  Maybe it’ll be less substantial than an Elmore Leonard novel.  Hoping for a thickish pamphlet.

This is huge and so are Obama’s balls.  He’s pushing a big pile out there after just sitting down.  They make him work for it.  I confess I have yet to see tonight’s press conference.  Didn’t pay the cable bill.

This Clintons saw their clocks cleaned over just such calumny decades ago and the beast has gained muscle and influence ever since.  The gravity of this specific issue is almost immune to underestimation for anyone who pays attention.  If Obama manages to prevail here, his wizardry will be all but unavoidable.  At his command will be the attention and affection of America’s heart along with her best and brightest.

Should he be bested and lose this contest, the path for him to accomplish any other important thing will be much steeper and traction much harder to come by.  I worry because so much is out of his hands.

This is bigger than you know.  Support your President.  He is showing you courage and fortitude.  Just because you voted for him is no reason for you to think your job is done.  Civic duty and patriotism are an American imperative.

“Walk right out into a brand new day
Insane and rising in my own wierd way”
-Art Alexakis from Everclear’s “Santa Monica”

Drinks for my friends.

Riding a bicycle on the ceiling whilst pissing up a rope

Birthers.

For those of who haven’t heard this nomenclature of dolts, it refers to a small but vociferous group of nutbags who insist, despite all legitimate evidence to the contrary, that Barack Obama is not an American citizen by virtue of not having been born in the United States.  Gotta give to them.  Sounds big.

Eh.  Gimme a break.  Like McCain Palin or Hillrod wouldn’t have beat this like a baby seal.

I’ve been aware of them for nearly a year and rightly assumed they were a brand of conspiracy theorists who’s inevitability was matched by  inconsequence.  Now, regrettably, it seems the media has afforded them some attention.  Regrettable for a handful of reasons, the most important could be the silly but vulgar stain the movement visits on an already gore festooned Republican party.

Swinging for the fences.

So there’s a bill in the house, authored by a Republican and sponsored by ten other Republicans seeking to mandate Presidential candidates prove citizenship before being inaugurated.  Redundant methinks.  This bill will end up in someone’s ass long before it sees the floor.

It is raw, desperate and willfully ignorant racism.  Stupid, unfounded, crazy eyed hate.

“The conservative talk show host Michael Medved recently referred to the movement’s leaders as “crazy, nutburger, demagogue, money-hungry, exploitative, irresponsible, filthy conservative imposters” who are “the worst enemy of the conservative movement.”  “It makes us look weird. It makes us look crazy. It makes us look demented. It makes us look sick, troubled, and not suitable for civilized company,” he mourned.” -Politico

Interesting that journeyman nutbags have issue with these particular nutbags.

On the other hand, world class dipshit Alan Keyes called it, “the greatest crisis this nation has ever seen” and warned of “chaos, confusion and civil war.” -Politico

Sheezus.

What concerns me here, and what may be the salient reason this whole thing is so unfortunate, is the insidious and desperate rage it lays bare.  I’m compelled to draw some frightening but obvious parallels.  I’m neither predicting nor endorsing what I’m about to say so excuse my caveat.  It’s just that these kinds of shrill and intellectually bereft movements provide fertile ground for the gun loving, God fearing wing nut, who sooner or later opts to take matters into his own hands.  These people are around whether we like it or not.  Often the best we can do is not stir them up.

By the way, if there was no religion and they couldn’t be addicted to God,  maybe these people would come to worship the clarinet.  In a few thousand years, the oboe.  Eventually the saxophone.  Sounds nice doesn’t it?

Guns don’t kill people, people do.

Unless there’s an accident.

Give them a really dumb reason and they morph from plain nuts to domestic terrorist in a week or two of  24 hour news cycles.  Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P which stands for personality disorder at the very least.  Already angry and just waiting for a reason.  Probably off the meds because of no supervision or no money.

Tick.  Tick.  Tick.

I’m watching Liz Cheney and The Ragin Cajun, James Carville, go at it on Larry King.  Tonight’s topic comes up and I’ll bet Liz is about to stick her foot in her mouth.  Let’s watch!  She’s all supercilious as she says ‘one of the reasons people are so concerned, is they are uncomfortable with having for the first time ever, a President who’s so reluctant to defend us overseas……….fundamentally uncomfortable with a President who seems to be afraid to defend America.’  -Larry King Live

What the fuck?  Are you kidding me?  Instead of calling it what it is, retarded and paranoid, she chooses to offer rationale.  A rationale of fear for our national security.  Pathetic.  The GOP insists on puking down it’s frilly conservative blouse.  Cut to the sins of the father.

Please let this ridiculously stupid cunt run for office.  Please.  She could honor tradition and be Palin’s running mate.  Oh my stars the grandiose buffoonery.  Palin McCain.  I’m so on board.

Given that I’m a bleeding heart, progressive goddamn liberal, I have real reservations about our role in Afghanistan.  The escalation and troop infusions.  Military might can’t ever be long term infrastructure and anchor for a foreign people’s societal and political constructs in their own land.  We are perfectly capable of kicking their asses but what then?  Iraq again with darker facets of Vietnam.

Afghanistan is a far bigger and more lethal power vacuum than was Iraq.  Iraq was stable.  This, the part of the equation Dumbya’s sock puppets ignored.  This, the part of this equation no one is really talking about now.  In fact, no one seems to be talking about that war very much at all.  You know we’re losing lives over there.  You know we’re mowing them down.

It is a movie far worse than you can imagine.  Just watching the movie would change you forever.

These “birthers” do us all a bad service for polluting the national dialog with their baseless and recklessly incendiary crap.  Swift Boaters still wearing paper masks of patriotism.  Traitors.  I wonder what would happen if we tried them.  Bet we’d figure out they’re breathtakingly despisable.

Drinks for my friends.

Run, Sarah run

Johnny Angel Wendell is actually owed credit for the subject matter here, a left leaning radio talk show host, by simply voting yes in a facebook poll as to whether Sarah Palin should run for the Presidency in 2012.

I too am in favor, if only for the burlesque it promises.  After reading “It Came From Wasilla” in the latest Vanity Fair, I’m convinced that the entertainment value of such an endeavor would be no less than awesome by way of spectacle.  And really, if by then that’s the best the GOP can do, it will guarantee a  second term for Obama or whomever else the Democrats see fit to choose.  Just think of the gritty pathos.  The humanity.  The vacuum of humility.

Now, 2012 is a political millennium away.  To be honest, I estimate Palin’s political career, much less her aspirations, to be toast crispy and black.  Stick a fork in her.  Sarah Palin is a dry, overdone pot roast no gravy can mitigate.  So yes, it’s a fantasy.  Forgive me; it would be grande.

The thing is this, the Republicans have nobody.  Not one man or woman.  Not one credible individual with even the remotest potential to entertain the notion of leading the party to any elected office other than say, dog catcher or assemblyman.  Bereft of leaders, message or even philosophy.  Reaping what they have sown.  Karma not just nipping at their heels but ripping chunks from their asses.  Callow adolescent diphshits and geriatric has-beens.  The C Street house of cards collapsing on what would have been potential stewards like Ensign, Pickering and Sanford.  Not so much burlesque as an ill advised, asinine dress rehearsal.

It get’s harder and harder to watch.  More and more disgusting.

As much fun as there is to be had here, this shit is pathetic.  It’s embarrassing.

There are members of congress who believe the earth is but six thousand years old.   Yep, Republicans almost all.  We look to these assholes for leadership?

I feel a rant coming on.  Yep, it’s in the back of my throat.

I’m coughing.  It’s like a goddamn sagebrush.  This is gonna hurt.  Sorry.  Feels like a tumbleweed.  Yep.  Sorry.  Got any grape Kool-Aid?

Ahem.

Go ahead, read your Bible or your Qur’an or whatever gets you through the night.  I’m less sick of your shit interfering with my life than it so violently and presumptively interferes with the lives of everyone else.  Then, it influences my life.  This is no way to run the world.  My God can beat up your God.  Wanna race for pink slips?  Archaic and absurd.  Fonzi vs. Ponch.  Two would be Italians, one played by a Jew the other an Hispanic.

We really need to leave this shit behind.  It’s stupid.

Catholicism is dumb and hypocritical and evil.  A religion based on ancient, obsolete treatise and decorum as much as rampant Church sponsored pedophilia.  Fuck these cocksuckers.  Pun violently intended.  Bullshit from the ground up.  The bureaucracy of this institution has no excuse and even less shame.  They steadfastly protect those who have or would have diddled your children.  Those who have or who would have ass raped your little boy or girl.

Yet they posture in front of you and deign to share God’s will and the way to a moral life with you.  Snake oil.  Charlatans.  Idiots.  Pretenders.  Phonies.  They don’t know or understand shit.

Them having never shared their pudenda with a mature female makes them sacred?  Holy?

Bullshit.  They stick it wherever they can.

I use the Catholics as an example because I loathe them.  But really, all organized religion is the same through the jaundiced lense of hypocrisy and evil.  So many of you need to go play in the street.  You’re not relevant and don’t deserve to be tax free.  You hurt and damage far more than you help and your “faith” is literally based on an imaginary man in the sky.

And they believe the earth is six thousand years old.  I’m done with you people.

Shut up.  Go away.  Jesus is not the way, if he existed at all he may have been a nice guy.  That’s it.

I hate religion.

Drinks for my friends.


A&M chapter ten

Meet Randy Staub.

I called him Rusty Stub.

Randy Staub, while still a crazy as fuck Canadian, was the polar opposite in demeanor to Bill.  Val Kilmer’s Iceman to Bill’s larger than life cartoon monster.  I learned so much by watching him rather than being taken by the hand, he was talented and I owe him.  Stoic and soft spoken.  Disciplined like a scientist, a Canadian hallmark, he effortlessly made things sound giant.  Rode his bike back and forth from Sunset & La Brea to Van Nuys on a few hours sleep.  Ten miles at least with serious hills in between.  Every night.

The guy was good, I courted him like I was gay.

Every now and then he’d wait for me to acquit myself of all things janitorial because he was too tired to ride home.  I became his hag, but he wasn’t a fag.

He had focus.  You’d think he was arrogant.  Nope.  Focused.  Generous and ridiculously smart.  Kinda dark, definitely more than meets the eye.  A quiet charisma with rockstar good looks.  Still he had a degree of innocence and sincere humility. He’s a celestial body in his own right these days.  Google him.  Randy Staub.  He became a wizard.  I like to believe I witnessed the final stages of that transformation.

Didn’t take long at all for him to be picked up by producer Bob Rock as his engineer  (Metallica, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Cher, The Cult, David Lee Roth, Skid Row, The Offspring, 311, The Tragically Hip……).  I did everything but wear a dress and paint my face for this guy.  I took his tapes up to the library every night.  I stole his ridiculous bike shoes, filled them with cocoa mix and duct taped them to the ceiling of the mix room.

I wanted his attention.

Late one night after U2 wrapped, he asked with an eggplant stained wine grin if I knew where my car was.  He’d stolen it.  My shit box ’69 Superbeetle.  Told me my keys were at the front desk, but wouldn’t tell me where it was.  Pay back for the shoes on the ceiling thing.  Took me and Randy Wine hours to find it.

“Slow but steady ay?”  Him letting me know he wasn’t impressed yet.

There’s more.

He mentioned to me late one night in his quiet way that he hadn’t tracked a band in a while.  Too long he said.  He’d been in The Mix Room for months.  He was asking me to find a band, an open room and to assist him.  Keys to the universe.

I don’t remember if Cameron De Palma, nephew to Brian De Palma, was still working as a runner at A&M at that point, but we had become good friends.  His was one of the best bands I never got to record.  Studio D was open the following Sunday, Randy’s only day off.  I set it up with The Harvinator.

Staub needed rest so we didn’t start until early evening.  They were not anything like a heavy or hard band, but that’s what Randy managed to extract from them.  Although it took hours it seemed to happen in minutes.  The biggest and most aggressive Cameron’s band had ever sounded and probably ever would.  Before I knew it the main monitors were cracked wide open and the band was sounding like I’d never heard them.  The song we tracked was political, “Surgical Strikes”.  It was the very first time I’d witnessed an engineer make it bloom huge so easily.

The experience still looms large in my mind.  I have a peculiar recall for the way things sound.  It was unlike anything I’d ever heard at that point.  I was floored and excited.  My head swam and my heart raced.  My ears were on fire.  Fucking awesome.  I was inspired.  One of just a handful of times that proved I’d ended up in the right place.

He had made this band who’s music I adored, explode with what I saw as the simple ease of an expert and adept craftsman.  Arguably not what they were supposed to sound like but that didn’t matter.  He wielded his power to bend them into what he wanted to hear.  He smiled at me just once, when he saw on my face that I understood what he’d done.

A wizard.

Late in the morning, after the band had left, all the cables wound and I had taken all the mics and auxiliary outboard gear back to the shop, I found Randy neatly arranging all the mic stands along the wall by their triangular bases;  a simple puzzle.  All arms facing the same direction like a company of soldiers.  There was to be a string date the next day.  A thirty or forty piece orchestra.  The powers that were would never even see the condition we left the room in and that was really beside the point in his mind.

Good engineers cannot afford dominance from the right hemisphere.  They rely heavily on the left side.  I’m good with my left brain but it’s no face card in a poker game.  Most interesting occupations require good dancing between the two.  Rusty Stub had it nailed.  That means he wasn’t normal.  None of us were or are.  At one point or another, you breathe that shit or you don’t.

You may be in it longer than you’re feeling it, but you don’t last unless you breathe it.

Anyway, then Staub gets married and there’s this huge rock & roll wedding down in Newport Beach at the Four Seasons I think.  He sent a Limo for Bill Kennedy and Scott Humphries and I was invited along by both Bill and Randy.  It had a push button liquor dispenser.  I shit you not.  Like ‘B’ for burbon and ‘V’ for vodka…….all the way to Newport Beach.

There were girls with us, I think one was named Jeanne and she was the hot one.  None of us banged either of them.  The Wedding and reception were classy and chaotic.  There was a dinner of some sort where I seem to remember Bill causing some controversey with his blue dick.  Humphries sneered at my jeans but I had a shirt and jacket.  Half the dudes at the ceremony were in jeans including all the guys from Little Ceasar.  Did I tell you Humphries was a dick?

I remember the party we had in the beautiful suite provided by the Randy and Janice consortium.  An ocean view and the honeymoon suite kept sending tubs of beer and hard liquor.  Literally every fifteen or twenty minutes room service was at the door with a galvanized tub full of Coronas or bottles of Jack or Tanqueray.  Not buckets.  Tubs.

There was this girl named Carol but I’d been drinking for twelve hours and I just couldn’t make that work.  She was hotness.  Red hair, excellent rack, a clever mind……….. the Maid of Honor I believe.  I don’t blame her for never taking me seriously after that.  Great smile.  Cool woman.

Woke up the next morning with Bill Kennedy yelling and spanking my forehead.  I opened my eyes.  Ocean View.  Bright Ocean View.  “Beer!”, he was yelling.  With one hand he was smacking my face and with the other he was holding a bottle of Miller too close for me to focus on.  At least it blocked out the sun.

I was into photography at the time and I took the most brilliant black and white portrait of bill that morning.  In his robe and sunglasses, smoking a camel and drinking a beer.  I gotta find it.  Roland the Headless Thompson helped me develop the film and make some 8×10’s

We went whale watching.  There were drinks on the boat.  The seas were rough that day.  There was a group of us but I don’t remember who.  That group got to watch me end up on the shoes of tourists a few times.  I’m not a puker so I don’t think I puked.

Next thing I remember we’re on our way back to Hollywood in the Limo with the push button liquor dispenser.  I think the girls were with us.  We smoked a lot of pot.

It took me three days to feel normal.

The whole experience was very valuable to me.  I learned some very important life lessons.

The first one is, make sure you don’t get so hammered you can’t seal the deal.  Sheezus.  Rookie move.  The the second is, try not to get so hammered you black out sporadically and eventually realize that huge chunks of a very good time are missing.  Been pretty good at those things since.

Also, don’t go to places you’re likely to fall down if you’ve been drinking.

I remember running into Randy outside of Tower Records on Ventura one night.  It was summer and his eyes were clear but the look on his face I wasn’t used to.  He’d just finished some ridiculous ordeal that was a Bob Rock production.  Twelve to eighteen hour days for months on end.  It may have been Metallica’s Black album.  Probably because it was done at A&M.

He’d been sleeping for the last few days.  He told me I was the first person he’d seen that he knew outside of the record he’d been on for months.  He told me he was over sleeping and needed to get out and about.  He was raw.  Almost confused.  I honestly think he suddenly saw himself in my eyes and grinned a little at it.

“Slow but steady ay?”  He said.

Drinks for my friends.

Walter

“The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.” -1996 memoir, “A Reporter’s Life.”

It’s a trite understatement to say he lived a full and long life.  My first memories of Walter Cronkite are from a handsome cherry wood Zenith console television, the smell of hot vacuum tubes and visions of astronaut endeavors in black and white.  The Columbia Broadcast System was the only channel with reliable reception on the outskirts of a very small town.

Rabbit ears but no foil.  We were a class act.  Roger Mudd.  Eric Sevareid.  Walter Cronkite.

CBS, NBC and ABC.

CBS.

The great improviser, who declared the Vietnam war unwinnable, after seeing it himself.  Pretty much ending the presidency of LBJ.  Legitimately speechless when Neil Armstrong declared one small step for man.  Yep, he paused when announcing the death of JFK.  Maybe teared up a little.  Unafraid to cover America’s civil rights struggle.  Back then there was the newspaper and the evening news.  The evening news was Walter Cronkite.  An icon who managed to eclipse Edward R. Murrow as America’s pre-eminent journalist.

Comforting that he wasn’t felled early like Murrow, Jennings or Russert.

But oh, what he must have thought of contemporary journalism.  The bar he hoisted so high, disgraced, disregarded and ultimately ignored.   Charlatans like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh et al. Infotainment and Fox News.   Rampant unfounded celebrity worship.

He came from an era when network bosses weren’t sure if America would tolerate a half an hour of hard news as opposed to fifteen minutes.  They did.  They craved it.   To then witness our attention span shrink and atrophy.  Popular culture force fed to America and the rest of the world, a phenomena that eventually rendered actual news not entertaining enough, no matter it’s truth or content.  Mr. Cronkite was already on the sidelines.  Retired.  How this felt to him must have been devastating.

One could argue that America has gone to shit since Cronkite retired.  Sure seems like the time we really began to lose our way.  I’m thinking Reagan era.  Could have used him then.

His own truthful ideal obsolete.  Forced to witness it decline from there.

Graceful and honest.  A surrogate for the people’s necessary information.  He chose to color outside the lines but once or twice.  When he did, he did so with the best intentions and the result sent magnificent waves through all of America.  He affected change by telling HIS truth.  Otherwise, he did a little bit less.  He told us THE truth.

We ended up with Nixon.

He told us what we needed to know as best he could.

Yes, I’m old enough to remember him quite fondly.  The smells of my father’s aftershave and dinner in the kitchen, waiting for Mr. Cronkite to finish with the day’s events.

Good luck old man.

My hope is that you went gentle into that goodnight.

Drinks for my friends.

You just can’t write this shit.

“Joe The Plumber…you can quote me…..is a dumbass.  He should stick to plumbing.” -Meghan McCain

Nevermind his name’s not Joe and he’s not a plumber.

That’s rich.

Sarah palin has the highest favorability rating of anyone in the GOP and she remains the parties most effective fund raiser.

That’s just sick.  Disturbing.  Portentous.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Sessions, Cornyn and Grassley step on their dicks in the Sotomayor hearings.  They focus on her speeches as opposed to, and in obvious ignorance of, her seventeen years as a sharp and capable centrist jurist.  Dogs and ponies.  They can’t come up with a damn thing.  Didn’y lay a glove on her.  Pat Buchanan and Rachel Maddow collided over her on MSNBC earlier today.  Rachel rocked by telling Uncle Pat he was “dating himself”.   Summed up the disconnect between asstards like Buchanan and well, the rest of us.

That guy doesn’t lose many fights.  She kicked his ass.

I’ve written about this a lot but I’m not tired of it yet.  The Republican party is one hot mess.  Tying their own shoes and that’s a bad thing.  An implosion that keeps on giving.  Three sex scandals in as many weeks, all three by prominent moralizing Republicans, who happen to live on or in (?), C Street and happen to call themselves a Christian Mafia.  I believe all three have waxed hypocritical about other politicians who’ve been caught engaged in acts of untoward.  They hollered self righteously for resignations, and now refuse to resign.

Fucking poseurs.

All this in a venue the IRS has been led to believe is a church.  A goddamn church.  Some media began calling it a frat house today.  That works.  The fraternity is the Christian Mafia.  Fuck me.

Spying and torture and assassinations, oh my.  Now I hear they used insects, fire ants even during interrogations.  Another wingtip slams the marble everyday.  Turns out, Republicans really are idiots.  Fucking arrogant, willfully ignorant, lazy morons.  They do nothing but posture and make insipid pronouncements awkwardly disguised as rational disagreement.

The hangover is getting to be a bit much.  I knew it would be a long one but it’s becoming insufferable.

You can’t write this shit.

When I hear about this kinda buffoonery, I can’t help but wonder just how much of this ‘berg is above water?

It’s like Republicans only drink a certain kind of water and the Democrats just figured out how to infiltrate the supply.  It has become the perfect storm.

Or maybe, within the most cosmic of ironies, evolution is biting them in the ass.  A burst of honest, progressive and still empirical thought manifests as their own species threatening comet.  Or maybe ice age.

Whatever it is, a hard winter is upon the Grand Old Party.

Drinks for my friends.

What I want as opposed to the apocolypse and stuff

Seemed like a kinda profound topic when it first occurred to me.

I want it to be good.  Pleasant.  Everyone gets their fair share and we are allowed to make our own happiness without concern for shelter and food or medicine.  We should have to work for these things for sure.  But, it’s ridiculous given the largess mother earth produces every day that so many go without.  Criminal that those lacking do so only by the hands of them that have so much.  There is a point where sanity ceases to be sane.  A point where it all is so ridiculous.

We are there.

Work with me here.  The last decade has seen the the single most massive redistribution of wealth in the history of history.  The rich got filthy richer and the poor got less and less than shit.  Veterans, handicapped and disabled.  Mentally ill and inner city humans, minorities and laborers.  All of them bound ever harder.  And middle class mouth breathers shriek about socialism and health care like they haven’t been ripped the fuck off by their own for decades.  Absurd.  Stupid.  The richest country ever on the face of this blue marble, afraid to distribute her gargantuan excess equitably enough to provide for the common welfare at hand.  To secure liberty and perhaps even the pursuit of happiness.

They wail and whine about any change at all to a corrupt system that incentivizes greed over service, while their very own pockets are beseeched and invaded by the paper champions they so covet and support.  Them that fall from grace in hypocritical scandal after embarrassing calumny.  Just how stupid are the great unwashed?

Yep, just that frustratingly stupid.  Just like that.  Over and over.  Again and again.  Fucking stupid.

Fools.  “Why behave in public if you’re living on a playground?” -DLR

An 8,000 square foot house for two people?  Maybe.  I don’t know.  Why would someone who makes twenty million a year aspire to make two hundred million?  Who cares at that point?  Unless you intend to give it away.  I can see buying a nice car.  I like cars.  I have a penis.

A guy named Horace Walpole said a hundred years ago that life is is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.

I don’t want my government using my money to buy so many fucking bombs and guns and ever more efficacious ways to kill.  WWII was the really the last time we needed all that paraphernalia of death and destruction.  What we need now is clean air and water.  A safe and reliable food supply, a clean well lit place to live, health care and a decent education.  These are not outrageous things to ask from the richest country in the world.

I’m not suggesting that everything be free, rather simply that productive employed citizens be able to afford life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  The poor and disadvantaged should at least see a light at the end of a tunnel.  We can’t take care of everyone but we can do a helluva lot better than we are now.

I don’t understand why the great unwashed or so afraid of it.  Health care.  I believe it to be a right.  It shames and sickens me that we are not afforded this merely because all of our money, yes, our money, has been spent on our ability to wreak havoc on the undeserving around the world for the last six decades.  To establish dominance.  To show who’s boss.  So there’s no mistake about who’s boss.  Disgusting.

I love this country and I love it’s people.  Well, some of them anyway.  We all deserve it, whether you’re one of the shit bags who buy into the specious, self serving bullshit fear the Republicans cram down your neck everyday or not.  We’ve all actually earned it.  We deserve it.

Are you aware that there at least four pharmaceutical/medical insurance lobbyists for every member of congress?  The legislative branch of our government is bought and paid for.  Duh.  The thing is this, we the people have the same advantage we’ve always had.   Same potential.  Same power.  They all still need to get elected.  It’s true we’ve seen rampant polling malfeasance, but I’d like to believe that if Iranian brand fuckery happened here we’d be pretty pissed and the revolution would be televised.

I’m not so cynical as to as to imagine the reverse.  Just cynical enough to understand why they do it so slow, so incremental, so deliberate.  The powers that be fear this muscle unflexed.  They know better than most that should the muscle contract, they are fucked.  So they shoot anesthesia directly into it wherever, whenever and however they can.  Enough of you turn the other way for them to get away with it.

It’s pretty fucked up.

Ultimately, the power lives and dies with the people.  I’m not sure how to put a fine enough point on that.  You want health care?  “Only you can prevent forest fires.”  – Smokey Bear

See what I’m saying?  We are in a better position now to get what we want than we have been in a long time.  What we have coming.

Look at it like this, nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction and they are obsolete.  It’s razors edge, but right now the game is plus or minus zero.  Even Steven.  Penis withering logic.  So long as no other country or state manages to acquire them.  That would be a game changer.

Anyway.  Massive armies are made obsolete by two things.  The clash of hundreds of thousands of soldiers is an archaic concept.  It will never happen again.  And the advent of nuclear arsenals ensure that as strategy, a hundred thousand on a battlefield is a relic of an idea.  Kind of  two in one bonus logic.

I work hard to bring this to you.

The only realistic way to cure what infects us is a carpet bombing of our defense budget.  The biggest budget for any single concept in the history of man.  Eisenhower warned us of the perils of a military industrial complex and it all came true regardless.  The peak of the pyramid of our plutocracy is breaking this country’s back more than anything else that is actually on the goddamn TV.

I’m cutting to the chase here.  The 800 lb. pound gorilla is us and our ridiculous fantasies of superiority and exclusivity.  America needs to understand that we are no better than anyone else and by that I mean country, state or ethnicity.  If we want a kinder gentler world we need to back off.  This insane figure of over a trillion a year spent for the killing of other people is just not getting us anywhere.  We’re good at it but does nothing but backfire.

I’m no xenophobe but we really need to look inward.  Devote more time to introspection and infrastructure.  Acting as the world’s over armed mall cop has done nothing but cost millions of lives and elevate us to the level of world bully.  The bully they can’t wait to see trip so they can kick and use their sticks and clubs.  Our foreign policy sucked and so did domestic.

Israel, for example, is a billboard for diminishing returns.  A postcard for liability.  Our sugar daddy relationship with Israel is embarrassing.  I don’t doubt they have enough nukes to turn the middle east into glass.  Time for them to pull their shit without the biggest guy on the block backing them up.

For example.

We are stumbling and it’s ugly.

We are the only wealthy country without health care.  We are the wealthiest.  We pay twice as much as most and  what we get kinda sucks.  It’s a joke.

It’s not that simple but it’s a good place to start.

Drinks for my friends.

Somebody turned the back burner all the way up

For what it’s worth, I began this blog on Friday the 10th.  My Spidey sense was bristling and I knew strange things were afoot at the Circle K.  I was right.  On with it.

Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on the subject of politicization of the Justice Department and subsequent firing of attorneys for purely political reasons.  On the record.  Transcripts to be released to the public.  Thus far the committee hasn’t relinquished the option of public testimony from either.

Booya.

Then this:

“………… in late June, Panetta admitted in secret testimony to Congress that the agency had concealed information and misled lawmakers repeatedly since 2001.”

“Far more important is Panetta’s reported admission that his agency has “concealed significant actions” and “misled members of Congress.” – The Nation.com

Redundant but had to throw it in.

I’m thinking Pelosi is off the hook for recent accusations that the CIA misled congress.

Then we learn of the subterfuge at the the behest of Darth Cheney his own self.  This from the New York Times no less.  He overtly ordered a CIA program, that may very well have been a vehicle for assassinations, be kept secret from the United States legislative branch.  This in direct conflict with the National Security Act.  It begs the oft asked question, who the fuck does this guy think he is?

Wow.

Next up:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Attorney General Eric Holder is leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s interrogation practices, a source familiar with the process confirmed to CNN. This precipitated by Holder clearing his schedule for two full days to read and reread the Inspector General’s ’04 report on torture.  A document as yet still classified despite official pronouncement(s) to the contrary.  A report that allegedly spooked the shit out of the former Bush administration.  A report described by those who have had access as “sickening”.  A report that states quite clearly that the interrogation “techniques” were not at all efficacious in any way.

Holder, according to Newsweek said, “There were startling indications that some interrogators had gone far beyond what had been authorized in the legal opinions issued by the Bush justice department, which were themselves controversial.  He (Holder) told one intimate that what he saw “turned my stomach.”

A torture prosecutor.

Oh boy.  Blood in the water?  Chum.  Methinks perhaps so.

I like Patrick Fitzgerald, he’s thorough and has giant kevlar balls.  Not your average pit bull.  This guy gets punched in the junk and doesn’t break stride.  He already knows everything.  Every fucking thing.  He knows Cheney to be so full of shit he looks to Fitz like he’s got a grill festooned with Oreos and potted meat and a full diaper.  He does.  He stinks like it.

An obscene volume of excrement has been launched with awesome velocity, a giant fan inside its trajectory.  The result will resemble a primate’s rendering of fireworks that frightened it to trembling.  Gonna be a mess.  Washington will be festooned with gore.  Inside and out.  he chimp will throw it’s mud at fools.

War crimes committed without a doubt.  Crimes for a war not justified.  Hundreds of thousands if not millions dead.  Tens of thousands of our own dead or maimed, permanently handicapped and not receiving adequate care.  Lies and irony piled high.

Ain’t that America.

The soft shoe approach so far adopted by the Obama administration regarding all matters prosecutorial notwithstanding, critical mass will soon be at hand.  A fecal combustion as inevitable as gravity.  Castles of cards flattened.

Arrogance, hubris, misanthropy, avarice and megalomania. All that and a dipshit chief executive of a once proud nation.  Making egregious voter fraud appear Fisher Price.  Right up there with lying to the American public about the urgent need for “pre-emptive” war.  The single worst Presidential administration to ever occupy the White house.

What have we done?  We are not without blame.  In too many ways, too many of us were complicit.  Those who weren’t part of a solution were part of the problem.  Forgive the cliche’.  They still are.  Wailing nonsensically about socialism when few of them can even define the concept.  Nevermind that any and every country to adapt national health care has never looked back because it works.  It works you fools and the people are happy to have it and research and the practice of medicine thrives.

Our own elected representatives moaning about bias and racism on the first day of confirmation hearings for judge Sotomayor.  An approach that is all at once archaic, obsolete and embarrassingly absurd.

See, the difference and indeed the solution has always pivoted or not, on the citizenry.  Our engagement or absence thereof; the most important example just visited on us by Dick-in-Bush and the great unwashed.  Complacency, willful ignorance and fear fomented and eagerly imbibed.  Thank you sir, may I have another.

There is hope here, but it remains merely a concept if we don’t pay attention and get involved.

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”  -Bertrand Russell

“I never promised you a rose garden.” -written by Joe South, sung by Lynn Anderson

Drinks for my friends.

Post racial? Nope

Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

Blow me.

A quick assessment of the faux furor over the Sotomayor nomination by overtly racist Republicans, notwithstanding that her confirmation is a foregone conclusion, and the swim club debacle in Pennsylvania, where existing patrons were frightened by negros and the public statement of fear that new members would “change the complexion” of the organization, stand as proof that America continues to harbor backward ass racist fucks as a significant and powerful demographic.

What we need here is a national moment of vomiting.  Why can’t we grow the fuck up?

In other news, I’ve discovered a personal predilection for naughty secretary or teacher student themed scenarios when I surf for porn.  Can’t help it, it blows my skirt up.

New evidence today that John Ensign is an even bigger douchebag than Mark Sanford.  No small feat there.  And this religious organization they both belong to called C Street?  A tax exempt church?  Are you fucking kidding me?  Makes me think I haven’t been nearly devious enough in my own life.  I mean, the obtuse crap I could get away with.  I’m gonna take one of those online courses and get my shit ordained and licensed.

Hey baby won’t you lay down with me.  Hey baby.

Something else I want to tell you.  Enough of the Michael Jackson media masturbation.  I’m over it.  A tragedy for sure, but enough is enough.  I’m more than tired of having this speculative freakshow painted on my brain pan every time I access any mainstream media.  I’m looking for shit to mock or make fun of and there’s really nothing funny about any of this.  Tired, tired, tired.

I like chunky peanut butter.  I’m a bit of a texture eater.  Last night my woman took me to sushi.  I adore sushi.  I use an alarming amount of wasabi in my low sodium soy sauce.  I kinda like that sinus brain burn.  Anyway, after the standard salmon and albacore with shaved red onion and ponzu sauce, we ordered a dish with raw tuna and tomatos slathered in the house dressing over fried wonton skins.  Texture and flavor explosions on my tongue.  Sinful.  Decadent.  Evidence of the divine.

Made me pine for the flowerful flavor and structural softness of avocado.  Next time I’ll know.

I read something today that said less than six percent of scientists identify themselves as Republican.  Go figure.  Logic and an empirical ethic vs. fairy tales lies so large they block out the sun.  I’m a socialist I guess because I just can’t own humankind is only six thousand years old.  Flat earthers.  I really want for people to believe whatever they want.  Freedom of speech.  Freedom of religion.  Freedom of thought.

Unless it’s really fucking stupid.

Does this look infected to you?

Oh well.

Were you to ask me if I like people in general, I’d say no.  Perhaps emphatically.  If given time to think about it, I’d probably answer the opposite.  As I sit here, I’m thinking about lots of people I like.  It is my hope that arrogant dipshits don’t out number the thoughtful and aware.  Who am I to blow against the wind?

Paul Simon always makes me think of Al.  I’m not sure why.  Graceland is a gorgeous record but I knew that before I met Al.  We made records together, Al and I.  So I called him just now.  He sounded good.  He’s just the smartest coolest uncool guy I’ve ever met.  If ever there was was a quiet genius, his name would be Al.  If I were him, I’d pay me to spend time with his kids so they turn out cooler than him.  They deserve a shot at being cool.  His family needs a Kenny Powers type influence like me.

They need an asshole.

The Windshield Wonder combines a micro fiber cleaning cloth with a long handle and pivoting head.  Ten bucks bitch.  Oh, the humanity.

I am so sorry for the sandwich I’ve caused you.

Drinks for my friends.

A&M chapter nine

My experience with the Canadians is a book in itself.  I’m thinking these bastards deserve at least a couple three chapters.

Meet Bill Kennedy.

I’ll never forget my first time.  Neither would you.  Kurt Gibson hits the heroic home run in game one of the World Series against Oakland in ’88.  Randy Staub calls, we’d just seen the same thing, he was pumped and his buddy Bill was with him.  We all thought drinks.  I wash my hands and brush my teeth.  Change my shirt.  The doorbell rings and there’s this ugly little fucker with brilliant blue eyes and long red hair standing there.  Tight black pants, Beatle boots, a CBGB t-shirt and a black leather jacket.  Teeth like a donkey.

My first thought was The Tasmanian Devil.

I stick out my hand and he grabs my balls and says, “Nice ta meet ya motherfucker.”  Then he laughs all throaty and mocking but like a fucking witch.  Kinda spooked me.

Staub hangs back with a half grin looking me right in the eyes.

Can’t remember what the deal was but neither one of them could drive legally in the States.  We headed into Hollywood in my shitbox ’69 Superbeetle.  They rode in the back like I was the chauffer and took turns covering my eyes and sticking fingers in my mouth.  They bought my drinks, Staub got shut down by some betty in fishnets while me and the Tasmanian Devil got shit hammered.  We drove back under the same conditions.  Except for alcohol and drugs part, it was a virtual re-enactment.

I don’t even remember where we went.

For what it’s worth, I don’t do that anymore.

Bill Kennedy or Kill Bennedy, his alter ego after too much Jagermeister, was and probably still is, a crazy bastard with a big heart.  He was to help and teach me a lot.  Sometimes his own worst enemy, he’d monitor and mix so loud his clients would be driven from the room.  His maxim was to “make a racket” and he always did.  Hard drinker.  We all were.  Truth is, he drank harder than most of us and that’s saying something.  Not as hard as the rest of us and that’s saying something too.

I was furious with him for using forty seven microphones on a drum kit when I was producing/engineering my very first record for Down By Law.  Even in a studio like A&M, that amount of excess taxed resources.  A day to sort out phase alone.  Ridiculous.  Over compensation for a tiny penis.  He was doing Demos for Motley Crue in D and I was trying to make a record in C.  Prick.

Once upon a time, he had like eight Marshall stacks and six Ampeg cabinets going full tilt in D, so loud it was leaking into the live echo chambers above C, I had one patched into a mix I was doing in B.  Had to go to an EMT plate.  Bill Kennedy was an abhorrent gear and amplitude slut.  Louder was better.  He sometimes missed the point.  Subtlety was never his Devil’s advocate.  It never occurred to him.

Bill Kennedy was a dick.  I don’t know what he is these days but if he’s any less of a dick I might like him more than I remember.

We became good friends and I miss him.  Standard greeting was, “Hey fucker”.  He taught me a shitload, particularly in matters of outside the box thinking and extreme approaches to standard engineering gospel.  I learned to push all the ratio buttons in on an Urei 1176 with the input and output all the way up at once.  Gorgeously unpredictable distortion.  Child’s play. Bill would patch six of them together, turn the line amps to eleven, push the fader to the top, mute the console, turn the master gain all the way up and deselect the mute button for the adolescent pleasure of making the NS10’s smoke and spark.

Call a tech, the monitors are toast.

I learned compression and distortion, concepts rarely mutually exclusive, from Bill.

The strip joint across the the street, Crazy Girls, was known as Bill’s office.  Canadian for strippers is “peelers”.

A story about Canadians including Bill:

Randy Staub had found himself a lovely bride named Janice from the other lot so we had a bachelor party.  Events are soupy blurry but I remember spraying Bill in the face with air freshener I’d discovered in the glove compartment of a taxi and helping to toss his ass from said taxi while it was still moving.  He rolled end over end.  Ass over teakettle.

Kadump kadump.

Not sure if it was before or after we got thrown out of a mud wrestling place on Western called The Tropicana.

What happened next is unclear. We were drinking and spilling and yelling.   Staub was good to go.  He was in some sort of a diaper.  Down there on the stage.  We’d all put up hundreds of dollars.  Not me, but all the other Canucks.  Next thing, we’re on the sidewalk under the neon and there’s a handful of bouncers with their arms folded, saliva ran from their snarling lips.

Proud shithoused Canadians.

I think it was before.  The cab thing.

I had wisdom enough to discourage an actual fistfight.  Been there, done that.  No win situation.  Bad idea.

That was my genius.

What I remember next is Bill falling from his second story balcony trying to break into his own apartment after losing his keys. I think I heard his his ribs crack.  We  got in and Bill was the first to lose consciousness, maybe because his ribs were cracked.  Pain and alcohol being a formidable force multiplier.  Yes Mother, there were drugs too.

It was Staub’s idea was to paint his dick blue with one of those jumbo Sharpies.  So that’s what we did.  Painted Bill’s flaccid, unconscious penis a deep inky blue.  Bill was so pleased, he whipped it out at even the slightest provocation for any member of the wedding party and probably a few tourists.  I remember some old folks being offended.  I don’t remember what his dick looks like.  Maybe I blocked it out.  There’s a chance it never happened.

He complained to me once that it wasn’t coming off.  Soap wasn’t doing the job.  I reminded him that Sharpies were alcohol based and the answer was contained therein.  He said to me, “Fuck, I’ll just leave it.”

A Kill Bennedy catchphrase:  “Take a long, slow suck on my runny scrotum you stinking cunt.”  There was something else about eggs in a swamp and elaborate theories regarding stale semen buildup or “SSBU”.

I just knew the crazy little fucker would never supply me with cause to question his integrity.  Were I to drop the ball, it would be on me.  Bill Kennedy would never throw me under the bus with alibi or malice in mind, however.  Kind of a miserable prick but he treated me well.  Fiercely loyal.  Big heart.

Much love to you Bill.

Drinks for my friends.

Bookends

Robert McNamara shuffled off his mortal coil yesterday.  Ninety three.  Architect of America’s abject folly in Vietnam.  In his time, he was humankind’s most  notorious failure.  He confessed to understanding as early as 1965 that the war was unwinnable.  Without Mac, there’s a chance the world would never have suffered his contemporary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Almost 60,000 dead Americans and some two million dead Vietnamese.  For nothing.  Well north of 4,000 dead Americans and as many as one million dead Iraqis.  For nothing.  A zero sum game with the exception of the enrichment of our military industrial complex.  A serious hole when you look at things as diverse as money and reputation lost.

The 2003 documentary “The Fog of War”, although fascinating, falls limp as a mea culpa.  It serves as more of a rationale for a despondent and tortured man than anything resembling an explanation or apology.  I believe he suffered.  Most people would say it’s lucky to live for ninety three years.  I’ll bet Mac didn’t think so.  He was haunted.  Every day.  He deserved it.

As near as I can see, we’ve learned nothing.  America is still a swamp for this brand of reptile.  Soulless  technocrats in charge of carnage.  Captains Crunch.  Obsolete but we still breed them.  By the hundreds of thousands.  Mac was a far bit smarter than Rummy so he had a way higher body count.  Maybe they’re getting stupider.  Maybe.  But if that’s true, then so are we, because we just got fooled again.

I don’t believe in Heaven any more than I do in Hell.  But if there exists a destination for a soul this guilty, it is my hope he ends up there and that Donny boy Rumsfeld ends his days suffering and tortured just like Mac.

Fuck these guys.  They sucked.

Drinks for my friends.

Bloviating gut punch or a self indulgent hit piece

There simply is no cogent remonstrance to be made for Sarah Palin’s resignation being in anyone’s best interest but her own.  Callow, cowardly and nothing if not character as yet still inchoate.  A better, smarter  politician would have stepped back, done personal inventory and realized her own tempest was precisely that.  Her own.

Instead, she threw in the towel and walked away, blaming everyone but herself.  She did not belong there and that’s not entirely her fault but none of it is mine.

Maybe there was an epiphany.  Maybe she finally realized she was in way over her head.

That would be nice.

Ideally, she could own some some humility, regroup and educate herself on the issues;  a little geography and some foreign policy.  If the content of her character was what her and her mouth breathing Christian conservative base would have us believe, after some sincere and earnest wood shedding, she could rise to the occasion.  Re-emerge a more sober, thoughtful and with luck, a far better informed public figure.

Either way, I suspect she has for all intents and purposes, taken the political dirt nap.  Notwithstanding her rabid enthusiasts, typically of the under informed and aforementioned mouth breathing variety, the pooch has pretty much been gang raped.  The resolute, far right, Christian neoconservative base is in decline.  An accelerated rate of atrophy as it goes the way of the Dodo.

Cheney tried.  He failed.  He will be hated forever.  He dines on live infants.

I’m not too broken up.  Political Darwinism eroding a really stupid and toxic doctrine.  As rapidly as the jackasses ascended, so precipitous is their decline.  Self correction as it should be; kinda vengeful.

Should she choose to run in 2012, her comeuppance will be complete.  Even were she to stage the most spectacular transformation ever witnessed by the instantaneous post technocratic media, she will arrive obsolete.  Redundant.  Too little too late.  She will embarrass herself and her party.  Her mascara will run.  She will remain a sullen runner up to prom queen.  No ride in the magic float.

It’s my hope she tries her hand at something else.  I get the feeling this was her first real ass kicking.  She caved.  Better to know it now, huh?

Sheezus.

My advice to you Mrs. Todd Palin is to pursue entertainment.  Not journalism.  Entertainment.  Broadcasting.  Somebody said something about a talk show.  This your best option.  I would get there soon.  You’ve already got a huge book deal.  Get a radio show.  Start slow.  Learn the business.  You’re not stupid, just not very smart.  You are the paradigm of right wing radio.  Right between G. Gordon Liddy and Glenn Beck.  The very exclusive, very elite of the ridiculous douchebags.

Learn to talk to people that are only as smart as you are.  You’ll be so much happier.

So will the rest of us.

Drinks for my friends.

July 4

Belated happy Independence weekend wishes to you all.

I do hope it was at least as good as mine.  At least as interesting.  I hope as warm.

“I try to use positive association……anytime anything good happens to me, I stick something up my ass.”  -Margaret Cho

I spent the day at a family barbecue.  Not my family, my girlfriend’s.  Extraordinarily pleasant and I hope to show you how interesting.

I always bring wine because I’m flush with wine and  that’s what I want to drink in the afternoon.  Hard liquor in the afternoon is uncivilized when women and children are present.  Family barbecue.  Zins and pinots for everyone.

Except the pinot had gone bad.  Cork came out way too easy.  No pop.  Tasted like ass.  Poured it out for fear it would get drunk and come back on me.

Very nice people.  Pleasant and warm and sincere.  I was under some degree of scrutiny.  You see, I was with my girlfriend, at a holiday barbecue, with her people.  Not mine.  Her relatives and very close friends and all manner of folks who’ve known her since she was a child as well as people who’ve never not known her.  They were checking me out.  I caught nobody staring.

I learned to slap some bones. I hope I got that right.  Dominos.  I was monitored during this activity as well.  Two charismatic women at the end of our table lent tacit approval while my girlfriend showed me the game.  They kept a close eye and nodded in approval when I made a play.  I’m not sure why.

Food.  Pork ribs,  meat sliding from the bone with juiciness and justice for all.  Homemade mac & cheese of creamy texture and richness.  Baked beans with excellent consistency under tooth with all the peppery and  flavorful.  Sublime deviled eggs made me greedy.  So many other things to taste but it’s conspicuously rude to fill your plate and not finish it.  It was just so nice.  My family does it too.  They set up a spread and pretty much welcome whoever walks through the door like an old friend as long as you’re with someone they know.

I haven’t often understood how swell it feels to be the stranger on a day like today.  Warm.  It’s warm when the woman you’re with affords you the benefit of the doubt in such a large gathering of people you’ve never seen before.

We ate and drank and the roosters sat four at a time at the domino table by the pool and talked the most hysterical shit you can imagine.  Brutal but always funny.  That was the line; say whatever you like but it better not be mean and it better be funny.  Nothing personal.  Inside those rules and the rules of the game, they played and played.  Loudly.  Roosters.  Peacocks.  Awesome.

I was one of two white people there.  There was me and one other honky in attendance.  I’m not here to make a big deal about that but it is germane to the story.  I’m sorry, I adore the word honky.  The word honky is goddamn funny.  Even funnier in italics.  Honky.

Picture George Jefferson or Fred Sanford.  Honky

So here are all my cards.

Cracker.

I moved from Carson City Nevada to Atlanta Georgia when I was nineteen years old.  I want to say this as simply as possible.  I grew up with white people.  The handful of people with different skin pigmentation were few and far between.  My parents were non judgmental,  open minded, freedom loving Democrats.  Not Hippies but progressive hicks.  I really never had a chance to develop a bias and I was never really exposed to much.

Honkies.

Atlanta Georgia hit me right in the mouth with it’s polite but overt racial divide.  First person I talked to fresh off the boat used the word nigger in his first sentence to me.  Southern comfort.  It was Atlanta when black women began to ask me what I was mixed with.  It was mostly women.  The better I knew them the harder they laughed.  I really didn’t think too much about it.  They were teasing me or flirting.  Still,  ‘Honey, what’re you mixed with?’  is something I’ve heard hundreds, if not thousands of times.

Through my years as a recording engineer I did everything from hip hop to gospel.  Punk to metal.  I remember being asked that question one way or another, over and over.

My Girlfriend and I ended up at Magic Johnson’s TGI Fridays in the not too recent past.  We drove away and it occurred to me  I was the only white guy in there.  Almost as soon as I brought it up she told me nobody else noticed because most probably assumed I was black.

I’m no idiot.  I understand that it’s almost mathematically impossible for me to be exclusively Caucasian.  I’m Scottish and German.  I  also understand I’m a descendent of Custer.  I’m pretty white.  Not pretty, but white.  Blue eyes, fair skin, blond hair…..curly to nappy and I’m all torso.  Broad shoulders, barrel chest and an oversized head.  Short but powerful hindquarters.  I’d make an excellent backwards digging rodent.

Today I met a white black man.  It was his house I was at.  Very nice man.  We shook hands.  He was white.  His sister saw me from afar and mistook me for him.  She and I had never met until today.   A rooster at the domino table.  His other sister observed me for a time and summoned my girlfriend from across the swimming pool.  She had a question.  The family half African American and Half German.  Grew up in Compton.

“What is he mixed with?”

It wasn’t just her question, other people wanted to know.  The thing is this.  My epiphany was thus.  All this time, the question was not whether I was black or not, it was assumed I was black.   The question was what else was I mixed with.

Not how black, but how white.

I contemplated all this this while driving in silence with her along the freeway.  Sitting in her driveway and the gorgeous cacophony of fireworks bouncing and echoing through a hilly neighborhood of beautiful houses.  Turned on the radio.  Frampton came alive and Journey sealed the deal.  Technicolor bursts  as we sped through dusk on the 60 and the 405.

I’m an agnostic.  Whatever.  If there is a sensible idea, it’s that we’re all supposed to be equal.  We’re all supposed to procreate to the point where we have no reason to discriminate based on pigmentation, sexual preference, orientation or gender, religion philosophy or fashion sense.

All along, these folks assumed I was black.  I think that’s kinda cool.

Drinks for my friends.

Cartoon brinksmanship

Awash in nothing but hubris, dishonesty and hypocrisy.  Ladies and gentlemen, the post modern GOP.

E-mails released today between Palin and Steve Schmidt, McCain’s best boy and chief strategist, are astonishing  in the contexts of hubris, dishonesty and hypocrisy.  The subject is her husbands seven year membership in an organization who’s primary objective is to foment for Alaska to secede from the goddamn Union.

See, I really don’t care about this kinda crap, though there is a much bigger picture.  She’s dumb.  She doesn’t get it.  Further proof this woman is not fit to clerk at a 7-11,  much less governor a state.  Will she run?  Too stupid no to.  God told Joe The Plumber to walk away and that is sad.  That could be a good time had by all.  We here at brainspank sighed wistfully in harmony.  I find that God is often wrong.

She remains the the single brightest star in the Republican sky.

Mark Sanford  seems to think he’s in a confession booth without realizing the world is listening.  This guy is gonna end up in a hospital.  I can’t help but be fascinated in a morbid way with his passion.  Still, he needs to spend some time in the garden, where there are no cameras or microphones.  He can work with his hands and nurture and caress.

Everyday it get’s harder to watch.

At this point my guess is that the Republican party’s chances of rising again are similar to that of the old South with slavery still a fundament.

Limbaugh, the Human Shitsmear in a haze of hillbilly heroin and a viagra induced priapism pronounces the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 overturn of a unanimous decision by a panel of three appellate court judges that just happened to include Sonia Sotomayor, as nine to nothing.  Tells us to read Ginsberg for proof.  Bet he means Ruth as opposed to Allen.  Still leaves her batting about six hundred before the supremist of supremes.

The elephantine look silly attacking a woman who swings without muscle between centrist and moderate.  They’ll crap themselves and explode if Obama nominates someone left of center.  Fools.  They should at least save looking stupid for a fight that matters.  Cartoon brinksmanship.

Ever notice the lower the budget the pinker the wine?  In soft porn it looks like Kool-Aid.

Drinks for my friends.

Hey macarena…….

My problem is with the shape of Norm Coleman’s head.  That and his giant teeth.  A thin lipped rictus framing nightmare white tombstones.  I’m so hoping that despite what Franken said yesterday, he’ll wade in and stir shit up.  Please.  He is painfully bright, a math jock at Harvard and very funny.  The long standing rivalries between him, Bill O’Reilly and the Human Shitsmear Limbaugh, are enough for me to sponsor him for Crew Chief of all he would survey.  His colon is clean.  He is not full of shit.

Word to Obama and the all the pantywaste Democrats.  You are out of excuses.  You now have a filibuster  proof majority.  If we don’t get health care, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the lobbies of AIPAC, insurance, the military industrial complex, energy and financial put in their respective places………..well then we’ll know for sure that the only difference between Democrats and Republicans is balls and spine.

Get something done.  Get anything done.  Or you suck and don’t deserve the opportunity we the the people afforded you.

The elephant = evil + balls and some vertebrae.  The donkey = a few good intentions – any vertebrae and any sack whatsoever.

The math is that simple.  The swirl of rhetoric around Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is disgusting.  Man up.  Show us a little something.  Make it so number one.  This is litmus 101.  If you can’t do this, given solid public support, we will doubt you.  Break hard to the left and run the damn ball, I for one am tired of waiting.  Show me goddamn it.

Time to come to Jesus, you so far worthless candy asses.  I am not impressed.

Is it complacency on the the part of liberals because there is no longer a a Cheney or Bush in the room with knife in hand?  I doubt it.  It’s mitigating but there is a preposterous malaise on Democrats that can can only be described as vaginaness.  Fucking pussies.  I really hate this about Democrats.  They’re all about it until it’s time to accomplish.  There is always a thousand reasons not to do something and then there is the single right reason to do it.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin claws at relevance like a woman scorned.  Just lately she sorta challenged Obama to a foot race.  I’m sure by now you’re aware of the conflagration between her and Letterman.  Methinks she did protest too much and in so doing,  audaciously yanked her daughters into the harsh light of scrutiny she so immodestly decried.

A degree of charisma, otherwise stupid and bereft of common sense as well as humility.  Can’t completely blame her, she was a snowball’s chance in a foundry by the notion she might warm the leather in that elliptical of all offices one day.  Yeah right.  Like installing Dumbya’s retarded sister.  See how I loathe?  She’s paper thin.  She disappears at ninety degrees off axis.  The epitome of grandiose insincerity.  What bothers me is how dumb she is.  Forgive me but she is a stupid cunt.

Big bag full of mashed up jack ass right there.  -Keith O.

“I remember as it were a meal ago”

“Said Tommy the Cat as he reeled back to clear whatever foreign
matter may have nestled its way into His mighty throat.
Many a fat alley rat had met its demise while staring point
blank down the cavernous barrel of this awesome prowling machine.
Truly a wonder of nature this urban predator.
Tommy the cat had many a story to tell,
but it was a rare occasion such as this that he did.

“She came slidin’ down the alleyway like butter drippin’ off a hot biscuit.
The aroma, the mean scent, was enough to arouse suspicion in
even the oldest of Tigers that hung around the hot spot in those days.
The sight was beyond belief. Many a head snapped for double
even triple, takes as this vivacious feline made her her way into the
delta of the alleyway where the most virile of the young tabbys were
known to hang out. They hung in droves. Such a multitude of
masculinity could only be found in One place… and that was
O’malley’s Alley. The air was thick with cat calls (no pun intended)
but not even a muscle in her neck did twitch as she sauntered up into
the heart of the alley. She knew what she wanted. She was lookin’
for that stud bull, the he cat. And that was me.
Tommy the Cat is my name and I say unto thee…

Say baby do you wanna lay down by me”  -Primus

Drinks for my friends.

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