The Cars

In other "looking backward, not forward" news, I stumbled across this concert video of "The Cars" circa 1979 last evening. 

The Boston-based Cars were, I suppose, my gateway drug into what became known as New Wave - national bands like Blondie, Talking Heads, Pretenders, Cheap Trick, The Police, Elvis Costello, B-52s, and yes, The Knack - bleeding over into punk, to brit-rock, to ska. I blame Jim Reedy who was (and still is, no doubt) far more musically progressive than myself. I'm not sure if we ever saw them live in small clubs in Boston (it's possible that we did, Jim was adventurous and a positive influence that way) - I know I saw them in '79 at the Yale Bowl* for SunFest79 (Beach Boys, Eddie Money, Flo & Eddie, Henry Paul Band, The Cars) and again during college (Boston Garden, it's possible the Clash or one of their off-shoots opened, the internets are not cooperating this morning in terms of documenting the show)

I'm struck by how "small club rock & roll" they seem here, rough around the edges and unpolished compared to modern standards. Remembering the individual members (one of the few groups I came to learn all the band-member's names), remember playing "Good Times Roll" in Jim's basement. Did not realize bassist Ben Orr passed away so long ago (2000) and so young (53, pancreatic cancer) - he kind of has a bit of a "Sting" vibe here.

Nice to take a look back. The Cars made the jump to MTV, but broke up in 1988. I picked up a Best of Anthology on CD along the way but I never replaced my vinyl copies of The Cars or Candy-O. I remained a big enough fan to pick up Panorama, Shake It Up, and Heartbeat City on vinyl back in the day (all long gone), but I dropped out by the time they released "Door to Door" which I do not remember at all.

* I also went to the 1980 edition - The Eagles, Heart, and Little River Band - and I wore an Eagles baseball concert shirt often enough for my artistic college roomie to make it my signature garb when caricaturing me. This second concert is a blur - I had worked the overnight shift at McD's. And somebody (Robin V?) had pot which I rarely smoked but did that day, all I remember is being about as far back as possible in the Yale Bowl and my fatigued, sun-baked, and stoned brain thought I was watching the concert on TV.

The Age of Miracles and Wonders

I've been in audio geek mode the past week or so.

The Guinea Pigs sound system lost a monitor amplifier at our last gig - one of two ancient amps that Dan trucks around, and I volunteered to pick up a solid-state replacement that could feed both mains and monitors. I'm slowly building up my own PA system (having previously purchased a mixer, snake, monitor speakers, and accessories), so added a 500W / Channel solid state amplifier at low cost, and a wooden rack to mount it in. I feel very professional.

That got me thinking about Om Street: Yoga on LaSalle Road - I'm the audio engineer in charge, and have been running a "two amplifier" system there for a few years (with digital delay to control echoes for the satellite system, 200' down the road). So while I was prepping and messing with the new amp, I picked up some way too inexpensive (seemingly) speaker cables: 2 x 30' Speakon-to-1/2" ($12.50 per) and 2 x 15' 1/4"-to-1/4" ($12 per) and some 1/4" couplers - which will give me some additional flexibility when setting things up this July. The cables came in today and I spent some time unwrapping them, marking them (I use blue tape on the ends of my cables, and blue velcro ties), and stowing them in the gack bags and bins. 

And while I was at it, I picked up an old audio engineers bible, The Sound Reinforcement Handbook by Gary Davis. (which apparently you can download for free online at PDF Shack - not sure if that's legit or not, but with a 1988 printing date, I am sure they've made their money by now. I'd just as soon have it in print, old school like.

A lot of what's in the handbook will be, I am sure old hat to me, but there are a few things I'd like to learn more about - compression, tone control for various instruments (drums, guitars, voice), speaker placement, etc. I've picked up some stuff over the years; as a musician with electric guitars and basses, as a utility and computer geek at various corporate productions. But always more to learn.

As I lay on the couch reading this afternoon, I thought about how many fun toys I have at my fingertips, in my arsenal these days. I've got a portable o-scope that interfaces with a laptop. I've got a signal generator, both a hardware version and an app on my phone. I've got a kicking audio signal analyzer for my iPad. I can set up a sound system throw some pink noise in, and tweak the tone for the room. I have amazing tech for very little money that would have cost 10's of thousands back in the late 70's / early 80's.

I thought back to my 8th grade self, who wanted very much to mess around with this stuff. How I would love to jump back in time with all my toys and help that little kid with a science fair project. I thought about my college self, getting a EE degree in analog design, running around Worcester county recording marimbas to characterize the frequency content and envelope the better to synthesize the instrument. I was minoring in music, mucking around with an ARP 2600 and a four-track recorder when I could get my hands on it. Having fun.

I never did much with music out of school - the Carter / Reagan recession was in full swing, the cool companies like Bose were not hiring, and I was happy to get my first job that led me down the power quality road. And it was not too many years later that digital sound came along and blew analog synthesizers out of the water. 

But here I am, 30+ years down the road, and whatever fire was there is still burning. I'll probably never be much more than an audio hobbyist, but it gives me great joy to have the right tools, the right knowledge, the experience to put a decent system together. Back to the couch, to geek out. Watch out world!

Atari: Game Over

I spent the morning unexpectedly entralled by Atari: Game Over (2014), streaming now on Netflix, and also available in pieces on Youtube. 

The Atari 2600 gaming console game out in 1977; I was 16 years old. I spent many hours in the local arcade (Framingham's Fun and Games, first opened in '74, and still around in an evolved form). And though my gaming days were relatively short-lived (the last game console I've owned was a Colecovision; I never really stayed involved as the industry morphed through PC, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Xbox, etc.), as a young soon-to-be engineer who spent some time in college and in the workplace hard-coding micro-processors, Atari video games were still my first taste of geekery. My family owned a 2600; my younger brother Kevin (now a programmer / database geek himself) had an Atari 400 computer (with that membrane keyboard).

The documentary is kind of remarkable. It orbits two stories: an individual obsessed with the urban legend that millions of Atari game cartridges of ET: The Extraterristrial were buried in an Alamagordo, NM landfill. And the programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, who created the ET videogame in five weeks at the behest of Atari management, trying to leverage a $22M investment in the game rights before the Xmas season.  When ET tanked (it was reportedly too difficult to play), Howard's career, and the first videogame bubble led by Atari, burst.

The film is technically excellent - interweaving these two stories, abetted by interviews with many of the key players - Warner Brothers executives, Nolan Bushnell of Atari, Atari programmers, and other public figures who have been touched by the games. There's a little bit of playfulness around "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (the movie, and also a successful 2600 game also designed by Warshaw) - comparing the search for the buried games to the search for the lost ark, and a very familiar closing shot....

When the urban archeologists finally get close to finding video game evidence, the dig has become a happening, with video game fans, Warshaw, and others flocking to the desert landfill site. And watching Warshaw (now a psychotherapist) get choked up, first as he visits the site of the Atari headquarters for the first time in 30 years, and then at the landfill, was quite moving.

Burger Prank Foiled

 The preliminary version (pretty much as told, with some things I forgot) at last night's edition of "The Mouth" at the Mark Twain House.  Thanks to Chion Wolf and Jacques Lamarre for hosting. The theme of last night's story-telling was "I Fought the Law: Encounters with law Enforcement".

An ironic twist - as I sat down, the story-teller sitting next to me, leaned over and whispered "That would not happen to be Marian High School, would it?" - turns out he grew up in Framingham and graduated from North High School in 1978. Small world!

In February of 1979, the band A Taste of Honey won the Best New artist Grammy Award on the strength of their hit “Boogie Oogie Oogie”.

In March of that year, the Three Mile Island nuclear plant melted down. In April, my father passed away after many years of struggling with cardio-vascular disease.

In June, I graduated from high school, and in August of that year – I was arrested.

But it all started with the Grammy Awards. “A Taste of Honey” had won the Best New Artist award that year, grabbing it away from our beloved favorites “The Cars”.   My friend Jim, the bass player of our high school basement rock band, with aspirations of making radical art, concocted a bit of social and cultural protest for this offense. We’d spray paint a Rolling Stones tongue, along with the tag “CARS REVENGE” on the billboard of radio station KISS 108, the local disco station whose advertising featured a pair of lips. The billboard he had identified was up three stories, on a factory alongside, and clearly visible from, the Massachusetts Turnpike.

So one night, a hand-picked group of friends drove in to Boston. We were able to get into the factory parking lot easily enough, and the building was designed in such a way that the three stories could be climbed one floor at a time. We each had been assigned our jobs – Jim did the painting, football lineman Kevin hoisted Jim on his shoulders, Mike (with his 70’s era Dodge Charger that you could sit five across) drove, one of the local track stars climbed the building and threw down a rope for the others. I think my job was to be nervous about it all and keep an eye out for the cops.

A lot could have gone wrong (not the least of which was Jim or Kevin falling off the sign) but nothing did – and we succeeded that night in our mission. No cops.

That evening gave birth to “The Maneuvers” – our code word for going out at night with an eye to making some sort of mild vandalism or mischief. I don’t remember all of the things we did that year – some were I am sure directed at or designed to impress classmates or fast food coworkers - although I do remember breaking into the Framingham State College gymnasium, and stealing a large plywood hand painted sign that said “The Pit” - the nickname for their student section – in order to place it atop the covered patio of the smoking area of my catholic high school, known somewhat less officially as “The Pit”. 

Now, that summer, we had graduated from high school and were heading out for college, and decided to enjoy one more evening of mischief. The goal that night was street signs – so we set out in Jim’s family ranch wagon, a cooler full of beer in the “hole” in the way back. We grabbed a lot of signs that night – we got our names, the names of friends. We had it down to a science – a rubber mallet, one of us climbed up on another’s back and gave the sign a couple of whacks – and it was off. We stowed the signs in the “way back” hole, and continued on.

Jim had a bigger catch in mind that night – we were going to grab a “Now Entering Framingham” sign. And we did indeed – this time with the aid of a ratchet set (there were a lot of mounting bolts) and a bit more time. We put that in the back of the wagon and set off back for Jim’s house. En route, we passed an “A frame” sign outside of a local burger joint, and one of us (possibly me, although it might have been any of us) suggested we swipe that sign and put it in front of the local McDonald’s, where a couple of us worked that year.

So after dropping the big sign off (but still with the street signs and beer in the hole), we headed back for the burger sign. Should be a piece of cake, park, swipe, drive away.

Unbeknownst to us, the Framingham Police were staking out the bank nearby. And, as one of the cops later reported, they noticed us and said “what the BLEEP are those kids up to?” Within seconds, we were busted.

Now, we were all “good kids” from the local catholic high school, and we were scared to death – we answered the cops questions, we were polite and suitably cowed. Well, except for Jim, who started to get mouthy with the cops. When the cops asked for help pulling the sign out of the car, Jim resisted “get it out yourself”, but I hissed “get over there” thinking about the storage hole full of purloined street signs, and the cooler full of beer, that I did *not* want the cops finding. As I remember it, the cooler was an inch taller than the storage home, and the door did not close fully. Even though I was not driving and it was not my car, I was also the only 18 year old (the legal drinking age back then) in a car full of 17 year olds, and all I could think of was 5 counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor charge.

But, the cops never checked the car, we put the sign back, and they let us park Jim’s car in the restaurant lot while they took us to the station.

Here’s what I remember from the arrest:

1.  I was wearing a red I SURVIVED THREE MILE ISLAND tee shirt. The nuclear accident had happened that March; my father had died that April. So when my family went down to Lancaster PA to bury Dad, I somehow managed to pick up a tee shirt. Somewhere in the bowels of the Framingham PD is a booking photo of me with this dumb shirt.
2. The cop taking my fingerprints was making small talk, and when he found out I was going to Worcester Polytechnic Institute that fall, was all excited because his brother went there, and I really ought to look him up if I need anything. Um, how about if you just let me go right now?
3. Jim seemed to enjoy the experience, swinging on the bars in his cell, and castigating the cops for taking his shoelaces and belt “I’m gonna hang myself over a sign? Come on!?”

Amazingly, we did not have to call out parents - we called a friend who had gotten paid that day and had enough cash to bail us out; we had to go to court the next day. I remember standing at my mom’s bedside that next morning “Mom….I need to talk to you about something”. Here she is, a widow less than four months, and already her kids are starting the long slide towards juvenile delinquency, starting with her oldest.

And to our great fortune, one of our party that night (who I’ll call J. Worthington Smythe III, not his real name which was a hell of a lot more ostentatious) was destined for Holy Cross, ROTC, law school, the bar and with any luck a career in politics, and had a father who had taken the same route. An arrest record on J. Worthington’s permanent file would NOT do – so J. Worthington II got the charges dropped to a misdemeanor, gtot the case nolo’d and had the records sealed – we had to pay a fine but no conviction record. Although to be honest, I’ve told some version of the story in job interviews. It’s the sort of “show me you have character” story that works in the engineering field.

  

And that weekend, in small, page 16 news tidbit about 2 column inches long, we made the paper: BURGER PRANK FOILED, with all of our names (and our college destinations!)  Jim cut it out, and taped it up in his bedroom. I would not be surprised if he still has it…

When Things Go Right

Took a few hours last night to go see Robin Lane at Whole Foods Glastonbury.

Now, I last got to see Robin Lane perform around 1981. I was a student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) which had a pretty decent rotation of musicians and performers in my four years there. Robin Lane and the Chartbusters was a regionally hot, on the verge of breaking through kind of group, along the lines of Blondie or The Pretenders. I picked up their self titled debut album on vinyl, which followed me around for many years, until one final vinyl purge (everything went except for Springsteen and the Roches - strange bedfellows to be sure). But a few years back I picked this album up on CD.

Thinking back, I spent many hours with this album cued up on the turntable, figuring out the chords and the riffs. I must have worn that record out because to this day I still remember the lyrics and I bet if I spent a moment, the chords and riffs are still in my fingers. It was perhaps my first experience of connecting to a local musician / band that is perhaps not on the national scene, a habit that has lasted throughout my life.

Here's Robin Lane and the Chartbusters  at the Rathskeller (aka "The Rat") in Boston, a venue far cooler than the WPI gymnasium.



So, Robin Lane came to Whole Foods. She's been off the grid for many years, but has a new project called  Song Bird Sings, subtitled "Healing Trauma One Song at a Time". Their mission:

It is Songbird Sings mission to transform those silenced by domestic violence enabling them to give voice to their experiences and emotions through songwriting and creative collaboration in a safe, enjoyable, and structured environment. To help participants to learn inner strength and resilience as they come to trust themselves, and others, while building support systems between those with a shared history of trauma.

It was such a pleasure seeing and hearing Robin. She lives in Western MA and plays house concerts and small gigs, and I hope I'm able to attend (or perhaps even held to arrange) one in the future. She did a mixture of old rockers and newer, folkier numbers, as well as some songs from the A Woman's Voice album. (which I picked up at Whole Foods but the CD was not in there.....grumble). Abetted by bass player John Pfister, a couple of Whole Foods percussionists (Callem and......?) and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Chen from Them Damn Hamiltons (on keyboard), she was...in a word, delightful.

Here's Robin in the 21st century:


It was a wonderful look back into my past, fondly remembering my misspent youth. Robin and I - we are aging well. As a bonus, my fellow Guinea Pigs Sandy and Dan dropped in for a listen - it was sweet of them to come share the music and my passion for this particular artist.

Crockett

Among the life mementos that I have carried with me is a 45 RPM record by a Worcester MA group called "Crockett". The A side is a bit of bawdy innuendo called "Judy Grew a Wildflower" and the B side is the something called "Some Kids". Circa 1979.

Crockett (led by Walter Crockett, with his wife Valerie and I believe featuring a young whipper-snapper on guitar named Duke Levine) must have played the coffeehouse at WPI and I liked them well enough to buy the record (the sleeve of which bears a price - 49 cents - although no idea if the sleeve is original)

For some reason I thought about Crockett this evening, and hunted them down online. There is a self described primitive website and sadly, an obituary for Valerie Crockett who passed away in October 2009.

Walter Crockett is still out there, playing music. I dug up a few videos on Youtube. First, a 2008 reunion of the band Zonkaraz (which I vaguely remember playing WPI, probably some concert or another).


And more visible adding some leads to a folkie duo called "Chuck & Mud"


I ought to email Mr. Crockett and see if the 45 is of some interest to him as a bit of history that he may no longer have a copy of....

Make Mine Music

I've been a closet music geek for most of my life.

In grade school, a local high school band stopped by one day for a performance, and a little presentation about music. I wandered home with information about music lessons. My parents, wisely looking ahead to the day my mouth would be full of metal, steered me away from the brasses and the woodwinds. How about a guitar?

So they bought me an inexpensive guitar, and I started guitar lessons with an old guy, Joe Diorio, who appears to have played at some point with Guy Lombardo's band. He was a funny old guy - with a studio in his basement. I rarely if ever practiced, but went to his house once a week and plugged my way through the Mel Bay series under his tutelage. He knew I was not really practicing, but we both kept at it.

I never did catch fire under Mr. Diorio's tutelage - instead my musical metanoia occurred in the back of a 1969 Ford Ranch Wagon, on a family vacation through the Wisconsin Dells. Somewhere on that trip, my fingers figured out how to find the chords without my brain intervening, and my right hand started strumming rhythmically through the chord changes. Against all odds, I became a guitarist.

At some point along the line, I started playing guitar at church - in those post-Vatican II days, guitars at Catholic mass were an "in" thing. And so we'd have this wall of (probably probably poorly tuned, in those pre-electronic tuner days) guitars churning out "I Am the Resurrection" and "Here We Are". I continued to play at Mass (in various forms) for the next few decades. High school - where Janet Cavatorta held sway and infused the services with Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, CSNY, and Bob Dylan. I was too nerdy to realize how cool that was. College (a year or so with the WPI Newman society, until I lost interest). Young adulthood, where I was plucked out of the congregation (visibly singing) by the music leader who was to become my spouse. And for a few years at the local Dignity chapter.

Along the way, I started to pick my way into more secular music. I remember in grade school, one of the kids having a Beatle's songbook he wanted me to play from. I had no idea who they were - having no older siblings to initiate me into popular music. My pop music sensibilities started at the Partridge Family and did not get far past Tommy Roe (it's taken me years to not think of Proud Mary as a Tommy Roe song....)

But in high school, I started to play an electric guitar - playing in the pit band for the high school production of Godspell; and then in a late's 70s basement band. We did Cars, Stones, Knack, Zep, Hendrix (I was strictly rhythm, but wunderkind Pete Toupy was pretty amazing on lead). We dubbed ourselves Broken Bones (figuring being close to the Beatles in the record racks was a good thing, and rhythmically similar to Rolling Stones). If I recall, I think the logo had a KISS feel in terms of font) so you get where the influences were.

And although my interests were somewhat divided at the time - math & science geekery, part time work at McDonald's, creative writing - well, music always seemed to be core. When my father died the spring of my senior year in high school, I tucked a guitar pick into his suit pocket in the casket. He was not a musician himself, but he always seemed to take some pleasure in my music and if he was not a band parent, he was always encouraging and generous in terms of lessons, instruments, transportation, etc.

As college rolled around, I fell in with another musical clique, 1/2 of the band Equinox of Westboro MA. Don Montgomery (drummer), and Stan Matthews (guitar and vocals) and I (picking up a bass for the first time). Would get together and jam at a WPI student apartment (Fuller 22, if memory serves) and later on the 3rd floor of the Westboro Package Store building where Stan assembled a small studio with a 4 track reel-to-reel recorder. We had a couple of gigs - a talent show at the WPI Goat's Head Pub (a black and white photo exists which will be graciously not scanned in), a full gig at the Westboro K of C hall (I have the entire thing recorded on cassette!). A graduation party on a flat-bed truck (all I remember is leading us through Jonathon Richman's Roadrunner to a field full of screaming drunk recent grads)

My musical roots grew deeper - Don was a huge Stones fan, Stan adored the Beatles, the Doors and Joy Division. We played all over the classic rock spectrum - the Animals, U2, Clash, Jam, Beatles, Stones, CCR, Neil Young. It was a fun time.

After college, I drifted away from my own music. My spouse was a musician and I kind of dropped out in the way that married couples sometimes distribute interests and responsibilities. But after a brief marriage and separation, I began to pack my old Ibanez acoustic into the car and hit the local open mike circuit. Starting at the Common Ground in Bristol, and ranging all over (Susan's in Granby, Roaring Brook in Canton, Buttonwood Tree in Middletown, Equinox World Cafe in Manchester) I played mostly covers with a few originals. My singing was never particularly noteworthy, and my playing was never more than workmanlike, but I was out there.

And then, 15 years ago or thereabouts, I started to mess with gender. And as my affect began to soften and blur, and the difficulty of moving across the gender divide whilst playing gruff and growly folk music set in, I slowly set down my guitar. I continued to truck it along with me to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival (I've been volunteering and attending for 18 years or thereabouts), but after a while it never came out of the case, and then for a few years, I stopped bringing it. For many years, I did not even pick up my guitars.

A few years back, having discovered yoga, I went to an evening of chanting called Kirtan. I loved the music, I loved the energy, and when the evening was over I shyly approached the leader, Shankara. "I know you have a guitar player, but if he ever needs a backup or a rest, I play too....." Little did I know that Jeff the guitarist was stepping back from the group, and Shankara was actively looking for a guitarist. And suddenly, I had a gig. Music was back.....

I've played with the kirtan group (not so far removed from my folk mass roots, really) for a few years now - my rather intuitive playing and many years in the folk mass trenches giving me the right skills to sit and play for 2-3 hours straight, to think on my feet, to play with abandon without a particular set list or structured songs. Along the way I've picked up a new guitar (a smaller Ibanez with internal electronics), an instrument amplifier, and an acoustic bass. We're still at it....next Kirtan is Feb 11th....come on down!

And for the past few weeks, I've been rehearsing with a lovely musical duo - Sandy (Vocals) and Dan (guitar) making up the Guinea Pigs (a rather interesting name, dubbed the night they went first at an open mike). They play an eclectic mix of great stuff - Nick Lowe, Simon & Garfunkel, John Prine, Todd Rundgren - along with a good dose of originals. They sound wonderful together, and I'm totally excited to be adding my bass playing to the mix. It's been really fun learning their songs and rehearsing with them - and rediscovering my bass playing chops. (We're looking for a drummer, in case readers play or know someone who does)

They play around a bit - open mics, farmer's markets, clubs, other opportunities. We're doing an open mic slot on Monday up at Union Street Tavern in Windsor. It will be my first time performing publicly like this in many years. I'm excited. Playing music! Hope it sounds as good as it feels!