Daily Dose #59 (07/26/11)

EXPLORING CREATIVE PROCESSES: PART 4


(THE TEST OF TIME: Section A)


Part Three of this series left off with getting to the root of all knowledge, and the act of personal discovery to find core elements of pure authenticity as I made the commitment to "make a gumbo".

Gumbo starts with the "roux", for all of you non-culinary types out there. A base of white flour, slowly and carefully browned and thickened in animal fat or vegetable oil; Making a proper roux, in the proper amount, is tricky business.



You've got to get it almost to the edge of utter destruction without actually destroying it. It has to be constantly stirred and watched for up to an hour to get it to that perfect dark reddish-brown, melted chocolate color and the right consistency of thickness, right before it burns. The darker the roux, the richer and more complex flavors can be achieved. It's a gastronomic high wire act.

Burn the roux, and you have to toss not only it out, but more than the
hour of life you spent trying to render it.

The next steps needed to be taken in making my creative metaphoric "Gumbo" was to conceptually identify what is called in Creole Cuisine "The Holy Trinity": Chopped Celery, Chopped Green Bell Peppers, and Chopped Onions.

There's no variation here. These three vegetables go into a Gumbo. They don't call it the "Holy Trinity" for nothing.

But each ingredient must be carefully chosen. They have to be fresh, and chopped to the desired consistency and in the right amounts; at the ready as soon as the roux is ready to go.

They represent "core" or "ground zero" structural concepts.

As I faced the possibility of transitioning from an instrumentalist to having the opportunity to take the full responsibility of embarking on creative and business initiative that would result in tangible output, you know that output will be judged to some degree.

"Throwing it out there into the Universe" has many emotional and character components attached to the act. One of them is courage.

You can not give a tumbling fuck about what people think about your "output", but if you are working in the arena of "Popular Art", its probably a good idea not to ignore the word "popular" either, especially where the "business" side is concerned.

That isn't to say that you have to be guided by popular trends as you make your own "Gumbo". If you get caught in that trap, you're already behind the eightball.

You just burned your roux if you position yourself as a dedicated follower of fashion.

You can shoot for "Elvis" or aim for "Fabian". There is a quantifiable and qualitative difference, and that choice is not without consequence. The measuring stick is just how much bravery you bring to the table as much as how much creative juice you may think you have to offer.

The goal is to stay true to core elemental concepts, and hopefully go way beyond the trend and set it. Raise the bar and obliterate the bell curve as you find the right escape velocity to create a large distance between what you produce from constraints of "the muck of mediocrity".

As I sat in my apartment on Winton Street in 1991 with my entire existence crashing and burning down around my ears, I knew one thing. If I was really serious about taking this on, and all it represented: Creating a "Gumbo" and assuming the full responsibility of making it, I knew in my gut brain that it was "go big or go home" time.

What ever I was going to end up with, it was going to have to stand up against "The Test Of Time".

It was my first and very possibly, my last shot at it; my feeling at the time was that I had better make it count.

You got nuthin' to lose if you got nuthin' left to lose.

This core concept, was going to be part of my "Holy Trinity". It was the first one recognized, and directly relates to the training I received in my tenure in a band called The Works, from the mind of my tutor and mentor of seven years, Ed Hamell.

THE 7 YEAR CAR RIDE: 1981-1988

When I first joined forces with Ed, his first move was to throw a pile of LP's at me to digest immediately. I had already digested most of them. I wouldn't have been in position to be asked to join the band if I hadn't to some degree, but certainly there were mutually recognized holes in my game and knowledge base.

All of those recordings were not only cherry picked by Ed because of what they represented stylistically. These records weren't based on obtuse esoterica to hide a sphere of influence, but on popularity and their place in the world wide musical, and primarily (but not exclusively), rock and roll zeitgeist.

There was only one true benchmark. All of them would stand the test of time, or had already done so. Either that, or would eventually prove to be of timely cultural significance.

I'm not going to go into a long list here. That's up for you to compile and find for yourself if you want to explore that concept. You are in fact, what you eat.

This I can say though: through thousands of hours of car rides, and thousands of hours spent listening, excavating information, reading books, and rooting out anecdotal stories, hundreds of records were deconstructed down to core elements.

The were dissected not only by their overall structure; Art work and graphic design, genre, concept (if any) or conceptual narrative elements, pacing, song structure and structural elements, hooks, instrumentation, arrangements, spheres of influence, production techniques and lyrics syllable by syllable.

Entire careers got disassembled and reassembled to figure out how the watches actually ticked. Who was the producer? Who was the engineer? Where was it recorded? What was the technology available at the time of recording? Who was the manager, and how was that career stewarded? Who signed them? What Label? Who broke them on the radio, and how? How was the team assembled, and how could we find out the backstory on every last one of them?

What was the cultural climate at the time of impact? What was sheer dumb luck, and what was brilliant design?

This was pre-internet days, peep-a-roos. There were no "Search Engines". There was no Wikipedia, and no YouTube to go to. If you really wanted to know this stuff, you had to really commit to finding it out, by any means at your disposal.

These were also the days when Rock and Roll journalism actually meant something. Ed required that you know just as much about Lester Bangs as you did about The Beatles.

Everybody from Al Jolson to N.W.A. got put under that microscope. Top 100 "All Time" lists were debated vociferously. One of my favorite exercises was the "Career and Output" face off. Madonna or Bowie? Go! Little Richard or Chuck Berry? Go! Springsteen or Dylan? Go! Andrew Loog Oldham or Brian Epstein? Go! The Clash or The Pistols...and Where Do The Replacements fit in? Go! Brian Wilson or George Martin? Go! Roy Thomas Baker or Mutt Lange? Go! Prince or Michael Jackson? Go! "Exile on Main Street" or "Sticky Fingers"? Go! Sam Phillips or Leonard Chess? Go! Lou Reed or Iggy Pop? Go! Dick Clark or Don Kirschner? Go! Berry Gordy or Thom Bell? Go! Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor? Go! Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters? Go! Johnny Cash or Hank Williams? Go! Jerry Lee or Elvis? Go!

This went on for seven years, and it was like going to a Master's Program of Rock and Roll, Songwriting, Career Management, Street Fighting, The American History of Humor, Criminology, Sociology, World History, Industrial and Technological History, Military Planning and Theory, Advanced Poetry and Literature, Media History, Advanced Marketing and Economics all rolled into one, every time that extensively touring car door opened and I set my foot in it.


Crossing intellectual swords with Ed was like stepping willingly into a running Waring Blender set permanently on "Puree".

These debates could get very heated, but in the end, it hardened and cured your knowledge base like carbonized steel.

We were unified as one, however. Brothers in arms, shoulder to shoulder in the same foxhole, discovering the conceptual strategies in all areas, deployed in the past and present. Hopefully in that process, we would find a unique mixture; one of our own for a common purpose aimed at a collective future.

We wanted to make history.

Or rather he did, and I willingly enlisted myself under his leadership and guidance.

No matter how arcane a factoid was or how it came to light, all of that knowledge had to answer to that one parameter and be housed under a singular umbrella of a concept.

The Test of Time.

In the end, as I look at The Works retrospectively, the band basically went through four phases in the time I was a member; A Springsteenian start, a Clash like turn to the left, a more current for the times 80's English Glam sensibility due to personnel changes and the influence of MTV and emphasis on visual information, and sort of petering out with a more punkish direction and ultimate vision of Ed's that the band, at that time, had difficulty in tacking to and following.

That last turn, due to the economic and sheer physical grind that The Works represented and the fact that we all were growing up and developing diverging strategies on how to acheive the common end goals, was probably one of the main factors for Ed to decide to close the final curtain down on that particular project.

We thought we were pretty slick, but all of those transitions seem a bit sophomoric and forced today. We were young, and we were learning the trade, trying to run through identifiable shapes, "periods" and image changes, and keeping the music and presentation fresh over a grueling seven year period; following the chameleon template defined by Picasso and The Beatles, refined by David Bowie and Neil Young, and copied rather ham-fistedly but quite successfully by Madonna.

That's an over-simplification, but you get the general idea. Cut us some slack. We were kids. We may have been miles ahead of the curve for the provinces, but for the world stage, we were a little behind that eightball.

We built a loyal and supportive tribe. We made some great music. We had a blast has we lived a very low rent bohemian, yet truly Bacchanalian lifestyle, and made great friends. We were downright inspiring to many folks. We walked the walk as we talked the talk, and paid the price dearly for doing so.

And personally, I walked out with the education of a lifetime. I'm proud of every note I ever played in that band and what those notes represented, under the guidance and tutelage of Ed.

Ed was on the right track, however, and has spent the years since refining that original knowledge base and the implementation of it for his following and very successful solo project, "Hamell on Trial". Unencumbered by the constraints of having to deal with other humans in a band and everything else that goes with that, he was able to make calibrations and changes much more nimbly, as he continued to hone and pressurize his coal into his own personal vision of what a diamond should be.

Just as my treasured friend and teacher had done, when my turn at bat came up, all that I had learned was going to be deployed somehow.

In search of my own personal statement and spin on the "Holy Trinity" of a future creative "Gumbo", one thing was certain.

"The Test Of Time" was going to be my onion. I didn't know exactly how that would exactly manifest itself, but it was going to be there. All I had to do was discover it.

(Stay Tuned For Part 5: Finding The Authentic Onion)

Author's Note:

All Dosages will eventually connect, for those that are following the entire cycle.

For those that aren't, here's one quick recommended read concerning Ed Hamell and just one of many of the lessons I learned from him:

033.) "On Rhetorical Devices, Influences, and Making Art "Popular": The use of rhetoric as a velvet rope and associative strategy 1981-2011

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/06/daily-dose-33-062911.html

Also if you'd like to learn more about "Hamell On Trial", here's his web address:

http://www.hamelltv.com/

I also highly recommend his interesting take on his "Works" days, which can be found here:

http://www.hamelltv.com/category/the-works/

As always, if you are following The Dose regularly, its going to be increasingly more helpful if you have a roadmap and scorecard. An updated master index is sent out weekly that includes descriptions and direct hyperlinks to each archived blog: Its a lot easier than searching for archived material for cross referencing purposes than the blogger platform. Just shoot me your email address at:

piannaplunker88@gmail.com

You can opt out at anytime.

Remember Peep-A-Roos, your feedback and the active sharing of The Dose is what keeps it alive and viable, and is just as important if not more than the actual generation of the content.

As of this writing, The Dose has received over 18,500 page views in 58 daily injections. All I ask is that if you enjoyed what you just read, hit that little share button on the top right column of this site, or copy the blog address down, paste it in an email, and give a friend a taste.

It's designed to be passed along and shared. Otherwise, it just dies on the vine.

Love,

G

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!



COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #21 (06/17/11)

PATINA

I found myself at a party in a house on Crawford Avenue I used to live in, and I didn't know where I was.


Friends I hadn't seen in a few years were gathered together to commemorate the life and death of a friend and brother, and I happened to be in Syracuse. So I showed up.

Someone had replaced me. That was cool, my life went forward too. I hoped Eileen was happy. We would always love each other, even though that love would callibrate to the changing times, and our respective changing lives.

I went to New Orleans. She stayed.

But here I was, just about ten years later, and all the faces of the tribe that her brother had built were there.


It was a tribe that I was graciously invited to join by association, and one that in someway Eileen and her brother Mike had inherited after their brother Pat had passed on to the other side.

I tried to help as best I could in that aftermath. I tried to carry at least some of that responsibility of leadership, but in retrospect, I failed.

The faces at the party were in someway a testament to the things that Eileen and I had accomplished together through mutual sacrifice, mutual love, and a ton of hard work done shoulder to shoulder. That was our legacy, really. And it may have faded, but it couldn't be totally eradicated, no matter how hard I may have tried to do some erasing on my own.

The proof always is in the people in the room, not the stuff, or where the stuff happens to be stored.

My friend Tony pulled me aside.

"Hey Dude...I gotta tell you something strange"

He knew me well. I love strange.

"I was on my daily run in the neighborhood last year. It was raining, and as I was passing your old house, I saw a box on the side of the road... and it was full of SAMMY awards... your SAMMY awards"

My interest was piqued.

"So I went home, got in the car, and rescued them. They were all fucked up, but I got 'em. They're in my garage. DO you want them?"

I was only in the 'Cuse for a visit.

I asked if he could hold on to them until I could find a place to put them. He said "Sure, just let me know".

This didn't strike me as odd, that she tossed this collection little monoliths to the curb. You can't let your old life linger and control your present. I had left many things behind when I headed out of town, and those awards represented just exactly what was abandoned.

I didn't blame her in the least for junking them. She saved the important stuff. Styleen always had an eye for true value.

When I won them, she was always wondering why I didn't savor the "win". The awards, at least to me at the time, were just the expected result of the amount of ball busting work being executed. By the time the accolades were lauded, I was already far down the road of trying to figure out the "what's next?". I didn't feel I had the luxury of stopping to smell a rose.


I used to joke that they would be cool to use in the garden instead of gnomes. It would look like a minature homage to "2001: A Space Odyssey". Maybe we could get little ceramic monkeys and place them around each SAMMY? My attempt at self-effacing humor at the time. She owned a home and garden store on Helen Street... maybe she actually did that before tossing them to the side of the road? That would have been classic!

I was lost then, at that party. What I thought was, wasn't. What I thought was home, was gone, and I didn't feel I had anywhere to go to. Hurricane Katrina finally took care of that. I was... irrelevant, on every platform. Hearing that those awards were cast in the gutter made an awful lot of sense to me.

So through the following years, I bounced around between New Orleans and Skaneateles, until I finally realized that maybe to really heal, I needed to be besides my family. I was one step away from living in a cardboard box.

Ressurections are hard. I've done them before, but this time? I was out of gas, and couldn't find a station.

Four years later, I ran into Tony again at Shifty's.

"Dude, you gotta grab those SAMMY'S. My wife is torturing me about hauling them around. We've moved twice since I last saw you. Now SHE wants to throw them by the side of the road!"

I asked him if he knew where I could pick up some work, and he helped to score me a little job with him slinging cardboard boxes in a publishing warehouse facility up on University Hill.

One day, he just brought them to work, and I brought them home. They had finally been returned after 10 years of wandering to their rightful owner.

I had a place to put them finally. I live in a flat above the storefront that used to house Eileen's home and garden store, now closed. A building she owns.


These awards finally are back under the care of Eileen and myself to some degree, after a very long journey. They came back home, just as I have.

They are battle scarred, Rusted and pitted, some with large chunks broken off, their facades scratched with dirt irrevecobly ground into them, some of the ingraving made illegible from just surviving. Their patina was not acquired gently over time. They are beyond restoration, but they still exist.


They are beat up, yet they now stand for something much more important than what was designed as their original "commemorative" intent. They are my life in visual metaphor.

So I have them prominently displayed on the bookcase, surrounding an empty vase that waits to be filled with roses.

Between the myself, the amazing band, and Bob Acquaviva, The Shuffling Hungarians won ten of these awards. Seven of them went on a walk about and vision quest, and two are in pristine condition in a recording studio. One is unaccounted for.

Hopefully, someone is using it in their garden as a gnome replacement.


"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!


THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #16 & #17 (06/12-13/11)

THE GENERAL MALARKEY #1

Author's Note: Many readers of "The Daily Dose" have asked that I continue to tell stories of my experiences as a working musician in Central New York, instead of some of the other subject matter I've been tackling.

I suppose that those requests have been made in part due to my thread contributions in the facebook group CNY Music Archives administered by Mike Donahue (do a search on it: It's a pretty cool site). I had somewhat an insiders view (or at least a unique perspective), and I can communicate it through the written word.

The reasons for my personal decision to initiate "The Dose" project (365 consecutive blogs in 365 consecutive days) are many. The main one is to just share what little I know and have learned in my fifty one years on the planet with people that might have use for that limited pool of knowledge.

But there are other agenda points as well. I want to improve as a writer. Diving into the craft of writing prose is a new found love, and I want to get better at it. Imposing the parameter of a daily deadline on myself forces me to write everyday, and as the old adage goes, "A writer writes". So yes, not all endeavors are solely altruistic, folks. I fess up on that point.

The blog platform is unique, however. It affords readers the opportunity to feedback through commentary, and because its the digital age, through metrics in some degree. Social network platforms are compelling to me. It's not just content driven, but driven by, in this case, the readers themselves. when you stand in front of an audience for a living, you know where you stand in real time. Writing and publishing blogs is slightly different, but not such a different dynamic that I'm totally alien to the process.

In the end however, it all boils down to this: I can bake the bread, and people can tear off a piece to eat.

But can you inspire people to pass the loaves down the line as they tear a piece off for themselves? That a question that at this point, remains to be seen.

I will say this however. 365 days is a long time, and although some parts of my life may be interesting to me, and may be interesting to you, there is no way it will be interesting to all of us for an entire year. That's unsustainable.

I fully expect that as I tell war stories centered on my personal adventures in musician land, that the well will run dry eventually... and I'm aiming to tell other people's stories as well, albeit through my eyes and perspective.

That's my invitation to all of my friends, fellow peers and even my detractors alike. Maybe through that, there may be a possibility of elevation, levitation, and participation through community unity. If you build a tribe of like minded individuals, this will happen. I know this for fact. I've seen it happen.

I try to frame these remembrances and run them through the final filter in the form of a question: "Where's The Gratitude?"

If you can answer that one, then you can more clearly identify the things of value that you harvested for taking the trouble of living through the experience. And at this stage of the game, those are the types of discoveries that I want to share openly with you. Maybe I can save you some time, maybe alleviate some kind of present turmoil, or at least give you something to chew on so you can chart your own course for yourself and avoid a few trees and potholes in the process.

"The Daily Dose" is a form of of snake oil. It could either cure what ails ya, or it could be just a bottle of valueless, repulsive bamboozlement. That's up to you to decide for yourself.

I would like to remind everyone that takes the time to read these essays that not only are you not required to pay for it, but that I am not monetizing this blog in anyway: It's important to note that when the snake oil salesman comes to town, he doesn't give the product away for free.

But yeah...if people start throwing away their crutches and miraculously start walking, you might want to greet that with a skeptical eyebrow arched over one eye.

I wouldn't blame you in the least.

So with that out of the way, let me introduce you to a new sub-heading of "The Daily Dose" called "The General Malarkey"; one that revolves around my adventures with a band called "The Bogeymen", which was the first time I experienced being involved in a group that had a legitimate record deal.

My experiences with this brain child of Tim Harrington's represented many critical turning points in my professional and personal life. There were many lessons learned, and there are plenty of opportunities to express gratitude openly for having the chance to learn those lessons. We have 365 days, so there's time enough for the complete backstory. Today's installment is just a snapshot of a singular one of many experiences.

But for those in the CNY Music Community that want a real look under that particular hood: Hopefully this will satisfy At least a small part your curiosity jones.


SHOOTING VIDEO IN A WARING BLENDER


General Malarkey Directs His Troops

Looking back at my tenure of serving as a soldier in General Malarkey's army, my hitch was punctuated by significant battles and events that occurred singularly, with great periods of waiting in between. Interminable waiting. Waiting to be called upon, in service of the band, and Tim Harrington's artistic vision.

Shooting this video was one of those moments. This one? This was one that not only did you not mind waiting for, this one signified that all the work that you had done for your first ten years of pursuing a career as a professional musician might work out as planned (albeit slightly behind schedule). All the training you went through: Countless gigs,years of exhaustion, the soaking up of real time knowledge like a hungry sponge, law suits and process servers, draconian agents, mind altering substances and booze in amounts too copious to cop to, epic failures, poverty, and mind crushing disappointment all lined up behind this moment. This moment was real and very tangible.

In the middle of a wheat field somewhere outside of Rochester NY, in the middle of a heatwave where the temperature was pushing toward 110 degrees, in the middle of the Irish whiskey fueled maelstrom known as The Bogeymen, we were making a film. A little short five minute clip, back then a critical piece of any international marketing campaign. Success or failure of your first realeased single hinged upon it. MTV ruled the roost back in 1991.

You didn't get too many shots like this, especially from the staging theater known as Syracuse, NY. How many other of your peers or mentors, present or past, had found themselves in this position? Not many. There wasn't a vast communal knowledge base of wisdom to cull upon.

Greg "Creamo" Liss, the bassist of the band, had been there before through his work with 805, Tim and Vinnie had been to the big show rodeo with The Masters Of Reality as well. It probably would have helped to talk with them to get some kind of perspective, but The Bogeymen weren't that type of band where nurturing was up front. There was plenty of nurturing going on in back channels, but at the surface it took the shape of "Fighting, Fucking and Shoving Sore-Assed Ducks In Salt Water".

You either sank or swum. You either emerged from the fires of The General's Gauntlet steeled as a man, or you got crushed in the process. End of story. No one was going to appear to hold your hand. The fact that I was being guarded, and nurtured, was hidden from me at the time.

My role in the Bogeymen had pretty much been defined by that point. The record had been recorded after a year of stasis via the legal wrangling to avoid being signed to Delicious Vinyl, but that battle had been lost. The actual recording and mixing of "No Such Thing As" was an epic battle as well, but one that was survived.... barely.

After recording, we went out to LA to throw some shapes basically, but ostensibly to mix the record. But when the final mixing sessions were completed, marketing campaigns, manufacturing of the record, art design decisions, and tour plans were being developed, as a sideman, it was more limbo. Be patient, and wait for the next trick. I did get to sit in on the mastering session during that period, and that was a thrill of a lifetime to watch Bob Ludwig at Master Disc master a record in real time.

Those type of experiential teaching moments were worth all the time you sat with your thumb up your ass.

Tim didn't have to include me in those types of activities, and yet he did. He was always teaching me; pushing me to meet my potential and dragging me across the benchmarks of his own incredibly high standards, even if most times he didn't want me to see a visible hand on the puppet string.

I was infantry. A soldier that followed orders on a need-to-know basis. A sideman, and the lowest guy on the totem pole, and the food chain. But I was there. I was on the ride, but I had no aspect of control of the ride. I pulled up in that wheat field pretty much clueless.

I was not part of any preproduction or conceptualization meetings. I'm sure they occurred, but my functions didn't include the need or want of any creative input from me. You just got in the car when your name was called, and showed up, ready to go to play your parts, and play your part, as written.

But I was in the hands of the most capable "playwrite" I had ever had the chance to work with. You don't get the opportunity to rub shoulders with genius everyday, and with The Bogeymen and especially Tim Harrington, rubbing shoulders with genius was my day job.

My personal agenda? Hoping that some of that genius would rub off on me permanently.

In retrospect, it did.

We walked out of the car that afternoon into Satan's Tropical Vacation climate: A brutal blast furnace of mind melting 110 degree heat with the added bonus of a 100% humidity index.

But this was the real deal. Trucks, trailers,looming grips, production assistants, and crew, little kid actors, a lighting rig, Arriflex Cameras, and Craft Services. Lights, Camera, Action! I felt like a space alien, but it was all very exciting.

The video was being directed by a guy by the soon to be ironically prophetic name of Markus Blunder, at least as far as the future of the band was concerned.

Blunder had directed a Slayer video ("Seasons of The Abyss") that evidently passed Tim's. Management's, and Delicious Vinyl's muster. It was shot in Egypt amongst the Pyramids, also partially in black and white... there was a brief confab with Markus about some sort of "Children Of The Corn" concept of which I didn't understand 75% of what he was saying due to his special combo of thick Teutonic accent and broken English beyond repair. He was an enthusiastic, junior birdman, blond haired blue-eyed, Aryan Eric Von Stroheim in overalls.

The basic narrative of the video was that there were to be four Mini-Us doppelgangers running around a wheat field that were attacked by nightmare crows, kept by a "bogeyman" in some sort of Adirondack bentwood style cart, interspersed with footage of the band rocking out. My role was not to question creative decisions, and certainly at the point where we're in the middle of a wheat field with a full crew would not be the time to make a "WTF?" peep.

Most of the "kid" footage had been shot by the time we got there, but they were still milling about for a few more scenes. I think the chubby one in the crew cut was supposed to be me, and compared against the physique of my childhood, not a wholly inaccurate portrayal.


We were greeted by Andy Gould, our manager, who had been slowly stewing in that crock pot of a location all day and looked it. Concrete Management was responsible for breaking Pantera, and Andy went on to post Bogeymen success with White Zombie, and I believe still manages Rob Zombie to this day.

Gould was quite a character. From across the pond with a thick British accent, Andy was always afflicted with some kind of massive upper respiratory infection. There was not a moment where he was either coughing, wheezing, hacking, or drowning in a sea of phlegm and mucous. In fact, we nick-named him "Mukey". So although he spoke The King's English, between his accent and the fact that his speech was always filtered through gallons of free-flowing sputum, you couldn't understand 75% of what he said either.

So the two responsible adults in charge of this bloody circus were basically unintelligible to an American ear.

My best friend Bob Acquaviva was with us too, but he was anything but my best friend at the time.

Throughout the period of recording "No Such Thing As", Bob had become the "fifth Bogeyman". We recorded at Acqrok Studios in Utica, and he eventually assumed the role of savior of the record (probably the best engineer/producer I've ever been in a studio with), and Tim's consiglierre/facilitator. He was right there next to all us for the rest of the ride.

Bob and I unloaded the van, and set the gear up in the middle of the field. Blunder threw Tim up on top of a 15 foot ladder, "Killing Ground" blasted out of the PA System... and away we went.

Throughout the day, we shot take after take, with Blunder shouting direction in his Germanic mangle. "GAY-OR-GEE! MORE OR-JENN!!!"

Or-jenn? What the hell is an or-jenn?

Many "Blunderisms" became part of the band's vernacular and secret language, and vestiges of that language still linger. Organ will always be Or-jenn for me and Bob.

And so with industrial sized fans blowing Satan's hot fetid breath at us with great velocity and force, we melted in the Summer's sweltering heat. The heat of the sun, the heat of the battle, and the heat of the significance of the moment.

By the time night fell and the swarm of locusts came out to devour our dehydrated, sun stroked, heat prostrated bodies, you could have carved four better men out of bananas.

The only thing missing were frogs raining down upon or heads.

It was most definitely, a "wrap".

There was nothing to do but go back to Andy's hotel and get stinking drunk.

Which is what we did, and wasn't an abnormal occurrence for this crew of Salt City Madmen.

EPILOGUE

That spring and summer, I was dealing with many personal as well as professional issues. I finally confronted the insane philandery of my wife that had been going on behind my back for over a year. I was the last to know of my whole entire social network.

That's not entirely accurate. I felt it in my bones all along, but a marriage should be based on trust. For that entire period, I intentionally insisted that I get the truth from her and only her. I wasn't going to violate her privacy and go out into the field playing secret squirrel. As long as she didn't admit to anything, that provided cover for the affairs, and that whole year was a war of wills, and a waste of time, Mexican Standoff. What should have been the best year of my life was one of intense psychic turmoil instead.

So I was the last to have verification. Almost twenty years later I found out who engineered that verification and how.

It was by the unseen hand of The General, who always had my back, but didn't want me to know it. A huge lump of gratitude found and harvested in the pile of wreckage, although very much delayed.

But at that time I was feeling betrayed by all, not just my wife. Every single one of my friends had let me down, and I was feeling very much alone in the world. There was no apparent "Band Of Brothers" dynamic in my life to fall back upon.

It was a loss of innocence. I had gone through life never thinking that someone I loved would intentionally hurt me, with great will and determination. It was a hard lesson to learn, but a necessary one. Wisdom doesn't come cheap.

These blogs are snapshots, however. What I know now is not what I knew then.

As I sat alone in my former happy home on Russel Place, watching the premiere of "Killing Ground" on "Headbanger's Ball", it should have been a moment of triumph.

It was anything but that. The person I wanted to share those moments the most with not only didn't want to share them with me, she had declared open warfare on my very soul, and had been waging it for quite sometime.

So... I did what any red blooded American Boy would do. I would re-dedicate myself to the band of brothers with a vengeance. I would meet those benchmarks, and exceed them. There would be no more "dragging me across the goal line of greatness". I would make it by myself and on my own initiative. I would be a man, one of my own design, and on my own terms.

There would be no question in anyone's mind that I wouldn't be ready for the next upcoming battle. There would be no more waiting. Only "doing", in the form of training and preparation.

Those vows were made sitting alone in the dark, watching "Killing Ground" debut on MTV.

That swift kick in the ass was just what I needed, even though it wasn't asked for. It set me on the course of being a real musician, and a real man.

So in closing, and in all sincerest gratitude and with a forgiving heart, I'd like to openly express thanks to my Ex-Wife; for charting my course, providing the fuel, lighting my fuse, and launching my spaceship that would take me all the way to New Orleans.

I couldn't have done it without you, baby.

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!


THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #14 (06/11/11)

MY FRIEND STEVE: PART 2


Author's Note:

"Friendships are funny. You think they will last forever, but life intrudes. Trajectories that seem to coincide for a time, skew unexpectedly.

As I age, I've come to accept that phenomena a little more gracefully, but as a child, it's hard to understand what was seemingly set in stone... wasn't."

These two "Daily Dose" entries, #'s 13 and 14, concern a 40 year cycle of friendship with Steve Krause, my childhood best friend. If you haven't read #13, the rest of this won't make much sense. Just go to the subheading in the right column labeled "The Daily Dose". Number 13 will be easy to find.

PART 2


When the calendar flipped to the year 2008, I was in rough shape. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I had uncharacteristically become aimless, delivered again by the Jobian body and mind roundhouse, cold-cock punch of total loss.

Self motivated resurrections are always difficult, and this one in particular would be the hardest to ever pull off. Frankly, there was a great question in my mind whether I had enough gas in the tank to even bother. Pulling the plug on existence was starting to make a whole lot of sense.

To yank yourself from that brink is not easy work, and after three years of it, I may have succeeded in snatching a victory from the jaws of despair, but it felt a little like a Pyrrhic one to me.

There just wasn't much left for a third act. I was running on fumes, with no direction, no concept, and no action plan. Just being alive was all that I could sustain. I was grateful for that, and that kind of pullback does result in some very profound epiphanies. I had new spiritual knowledge, but I had no where to direct it.

And then I got a call in the middle of May, and for me. it was a lifeline.

Stacey Waterman, a Central New York agent,promoter, and impresario of note, called and asked if I'd like to do an outdoor Shuffling Hungarians show, ostensibly to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Dave Frisina's radio programme "Soundcheck". Being able to emerge and tell someone how much I love him and what he stood for for thirty years was just too good of an opportunity to pass up.


She offered enough of a retainer for me to drop my glamorous career of professional toilet cleaner in New Orleans to relocate temporarily to Central New York, put the show together, and give Dave the celebration that he truly deserved. Again, at this stage of life, showing gratitude publicly and openly was part of my new rule book.

So I made the appropriate phone calls to those who would still take them, packed up the car, and drove to the place from whence I came, Skaneateles, New York. "Little Georgie" was going to deliver me from the ash heap. He did it before, and now he was beckoning with the promise to do it again.

It didn't really work out that way, but that's a blog for another day. I do have to write 365 of them, so blowing my wad on the 14th isn't exactly advisable. Y'all are just going to have to wait for that one.


Suffice to say, I drove up from New Orleans, my car packed with the bare minimum of computer, clothes, a $300 electric piano, and my as always intrepid life's travelling podners Huckleberry and Doodle, with a sense of purpose and a sense of direction: two things that were sorely needed, and were provided by Stacy Waterman, bless her heart. Ask and ye shall receive. The universe spoke, and I wasn't in a position not to listen.

I aimed straight for home in more ways then one.

I had scored a little railroad apartment from my friends Bob and Pam Wayne in the village limits on State Street, right across from The Baptist Church, separated by the access driveway to the Municipal parking lot. Mom's and Pops provided an air mattress and some towels. It was enough to get started rehearsing the band in Syracuse and designing the show with the 12th and 13th official members of the Hungarians, Timmy and Stevie Schad: But it was a pretty spartan, monastic existence, and environment is kind of important to me. I was on the look out to snag some cheap furniture.


My sister Becky was visiting from Falmouth, Massachusettes for the Fourth Of July weekend, and she came knocking on my door to tell me there was a pretty rocking garage sale going on about half a block to the North on State Street, so I high tailed it up there to see what I could see.

Sure enough, they had what I was looking for: Specifically a bedroom set so I could sleep on a real bed, and stop pulling clothes out of boxes and duffel bags. As I negotiated a price on the set with the lady of the house, a red sports car pulled up.

And out of that car emerged a typical sight in Skaneateles I guess. But it was a-typical to me. Two men poured themselves out of the car, one older than the other; but both were... beautiful. The elder tall and fit, adorned in tennis togs and a thick mane of white hair; The younger, approximately my age, graying but still easy on the eyes. They were confidently strolling up the driveway, and as I tried to unsuccessfully haggle with the seller, the seller's husband showed up to greet their visitors.

It took awhile for the folks to introduce me, but finally one was offered.

"George, these are our friends, Al and Steve Krause"

Steve Krause? I hadn't seen him, my very best buddy from my early youth,in over thirty six years. All that good stuff and all those happy memories of childhood not only flooded my consciousness, they flat out deluged me... overwhelmed me. I was very much tuned into the signs that the Universe was offering, and this was a big one.

I automatically threw my arms around him, bear hugged him with my eyes leaking tears of joy. I gushed openly about how thrilled I was to see him.

His back stiffened.

I got the message pretty quickly. Some folks just don't like their space invaded, and clearly I had done that. It had been over thirty years, and just because I was thrilled to see him, didn't mean I had to automatically assume he felt the same way.

I immediately backed off, made arrangements to pick up the bedroom set the next day, shook Al and Steve's hand, and headed back to my barren apartment.

When I arrived the next day to pick up the furniture, I got pulled conspiratorially aside by the women who sold me the stuff.

"You know, you really freaked Steve out yesterday"

I started to explain to her that I was aware of my social faux pas of blathering all over him but she stopped me.

"No... it wasn't that at all. You mean you don't know?"

"Know what?", I asked, asking myself the internal question of "Why am I always the last one to know anything?"

"Steve and my husband are avid cyclists, and have ridden together for years. He was in an accident... hit by a truck, and suffered severe head trauma. He's had a very hard time adjusting to the fact that not only is he struggling with diminished mental capacity, he's also very well aware of it.... it's been very hard on him and his family."

This was awful news, but I still couldn't put together why my being glad to see him would freak him out, and stated as such.

"You are George, right? George Rossi?"

I nodded "yes"

"The George Rossi that was hit by a car?"

Again, the nod of assent. I still didn't know where she was going with this.

"After you left yesterday, Steve broke down and told us the story of how you got hit by a car... and that for thirty years, that memory has haunted him. He has never forgiven himself for letting go of you in the street... and that the sight of your mangled head never failed in provided a recurring nightmare"

And then, she delivered the simultaneous kick to the solar plexus and the cranium combined.

"He believes his accident was Karmic Justice for that night.... and that seeing you, and seeing how feeling how overjoyed you were to see him, was an omen: Validation for thinking that his accident was a debt owed, and paid.... to you".

AN ASIDE

Time for a break in the action, folks. I often tell friends that the key to understanding others isn't just making the attempt to view events from their perspective. You not only have to take the trouble to see things from inside their shoes: you have to know enough about them to THINK like them too... really see things as they perceive them, not just from their angle of perception. Stepping inside someone Else's shoes and making the critical mistake of thinking like yourself gets you nowhere.

So if I really sat and thought about what Steve as a child went through that night 40 years or so ago... watching his best friend get slammed by a car, seeing me flying in the air and crashing to the ground... frantically trying to get help, watching me bleed out lying in a pool of thick black red goo, witnessing my brains throbbing. Try to think about what that must have been for an 11 year old kid, and to feel ultimately responsible for it.

I assure you, I never did. I was out of it at the onset, but never in thirty years did I ever think that all those kids, but especially Steve, might have suffered some kind of post traumatic stress disorder by bearing witness to an accident soaked in very real carnage.

And the very sad part of all of this, is that maybe some of that damage could have been mitigated with a simple talk. A simple "it wasn't your fault" or a simple "I love you". Whole trajectories could have been changed.

But that isn't how it played out. I thought that when I returned to school after the accident that my friends sort of shunned me because I was stupid... and hideously ugly. It never occurred to me that they might have been feeling guilty. I never blamed them, but they thought that maybe I did. At least Steve did

This tale as told by a stranger running a garage sale, was for me a lot to process. As I drove away like Jethro Clampett with a truckload of bedroom furniture, one thought kept drilling into me: What if I wasn't brought here to fix me? What if The Universe brought me here to fix something, or someone else?

You gotta read the signs peep-a-roos. They are not what they always may seem at first glance. You have to see the unseen connective tissue between points and events on the time continuum.

But there is one thing I can state with absolute certainty. When The Universe knocks on your door, you had better open it. And get your ass into position to receive the gift.

And if you recognize just what it is that is actually being provided for you by that knock... an opportunity that may be hard to see at first, but is still there: you better for fuck's sake take advantage of that opportunity, because ones of this nature come few and far between.

If you don't act on that, you are a putz to end all putzery. Comprende, Amigos?

Stay tuned for the 15th installment of "The Daily Dose", and the third part of this trilogy, a tribute to my friend, Steve Krause.

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!


THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #10 (06/07/11)

THE BEST OF TIMES AND THE WORST OF TIMES PT.I ("Falling In Love Again, Never Wanted To...")


I moved down to New Orleans in the autumn of 1997, and I got hit by lightning a year later.

My first year of my unexpected Yankee Relocation Agenda was going pretty well. I thought I was only going to be visiting "The City That Care Forgot" only momentarily to produce a the 25th anniversary recording for The Wild Magnolias, but the project went long, and I spontaneously decided to escape for good.

I scored a great little furnished inlaw apartment in the back of a mansion on the 600 block of Esplanade Avenue, and in the attached slave quarters the New Orleans offices of NYNO records was right next door.

NYNO was a joint venture between Allen Toussaint and Josh Feigenbaum, who owned a bunch of radio stations up in NYC, hence NY-NO. But the staff and the artists alike could always be found poolside in our shared courtyard. Trisha Boutte, The great gospel artist Raymond Myles, and even Mr. Toussaint himself could always be found looming about my backyard on any given day. For a skinny assed Yankee invader who loved New Orleans music with all his heart, I really was living in a surrealist dream come true.

I was picking up gigs here and there, playing with Cyril Neville and The Uptown Allstars, James Andrews, and a few others, just trying to slowly assimilate and soak up the culture. Life was slow, but sweet as the night blooming jasmine scented air.

One (freakishly to me) typical New Orleans summer night, I was walking back from a little pick-up gig at Donna's on Rampart with another Central New York musician transplant, Mark McGrain. We decided to pop over to Royal Street to pick up a bottle of wine and some smokes at the Verti Mart before we hit his apartment. I walked in, and that's when lightning struck.

She was at the counter, buying a pint of vodka and a pack of American Spirits. She turned around, her blond mane swinging sympathetically, flashed her smile, her eyes sparkling like corn flower colored stars, and gave Mark a hug. They were friends. I just stared at her dumbfounded and tongue tied. She had a sexy rasp in her voice that mere mortal men would die for to have whispered directly into their ear.

I can't even remember if he introduced us. Before I got my bearings, she was ambling out the door, and into the driver's side of an illegally parked caramel colored VW Super Beetle.

I never believed in the concept of love at first sight. My Dad, when talking about the first time he laid eyes on my Mother, always said that at that very moment, he knew that this was the women that he would marry. I never believed him until I found myself in front of the counter of The Verti Mart, staring at Miss Kimberly Ann Krohn. Now I knew exactly what he was talking about.

Me: "Who was that?"

Mark: "That's my friend Kim... and George, don't even think of going there. She's out of your league."

Me: "I'm in a league? Since when?"

He wasn't going to knock me off this path, no matter how hard he tried... and he tried valiantly that night. I was having none of it as I pretended to accept his warnings in earnest and nod my head in assent.

She met up with us at Mark's apartment that he shared with his girlfriend Cheryl. Evidently she was a piano entertainer at a duelling piano bar called Pat O'Briens, and had a few minutes to have a glass of wine with us before she hit the stage. I really don't remember much of this, because all I could do was be mute, stare, and try not to be a fool by opening my mouth and removing all doubt. I'm sure I didn't leave much of an impression.

But I did leave Mark's apartment with a prime directive, along with the critical tidbit of information about her place of employment. The actual battle plan would have to be developed, but I knew down to my toes that this women's heart would be mine, or I would die in the attempt. Victory or Death. Failure just wasn't an option.


But I'm a "slow" player. I just went down to Pat O'Brien's randomly every night, until I casually and not so coincidentally "bumped" into her.

But there was a flaw in my "stalk subtly" methodology: The dueling pianna plunkers at Pat O's appeared nightly in two sets of two, and alternated shows every hour on the hour. Every time I went down there, the alternate set of duellists would be playing, and since I didn't know how shit worked down there, I made the erroneous assumption that the pair on the the stage were going to be there for the duration of the evening. I never knew there was going to be a second pair of entertainers coming up at the top of the hour.

It was just bad timing. I never arrived during a "switch-over", so I would just show up, sit at a table, drink a Heineken, be crestfallen, and then leave depressed. I lost her before I even had a chance.

This went on for about two weeks. Flaming courtyard fountains, sticky table tops befouled with Hurrican juice, and abyssmal piano reductions of "Brown Eyed Girl" can quickly lose allure. I could only hang for twenty minutes at a crack.

But I was not to be deterred. Every time I decided to make an appearance with my chances slim, I still walked down to St. Peter Street filled with hope even though I knew there was a high probability of returning home about a half hour later with hope dashed. And for two weeks, with that dashed hope, I'd walk out of Pat O's breezeway entrance, stop at the A&P to make some groceries, and take the left turn down Royal and mosey dejectedly home; Listening to the palmetto bugs scuttling across the sidewalk in the dim gas light infused darkness. The iconic Blue Dog in Georges Rodrigue's gallery window would mock me as I walked past it , despondent. I would mutter aloud for it to go fuck itself after every failed attempt.

Kim was probably right across the street from Pat O's at Johnny White's on her one of her three hour long breaks, but I never thought to look there.

It was a typically steaming New Orleans summer. Not much going on in August, especially at tourist destination French Quarter entertainment spots. And not much going on for the people that work at them. In retrospect, my timing couldn't have been better, even though I was being the victim of bad timing in the short term.

So finally, the planets and the stars aligned, and my persistence paid off. When I walked into the piano bar of Pat O's that night, I walked into the beginning a dream. There she was, all decked out in some sort of sequined ensemble, on the stage commandeering one of the copper sheathed pianos.

Her singing and her playing outshone the dress she was wearing. I was done for.

It was the last set of the night. Again, in her presence, my cognitive and comprehension skills were short-circuited, my rehearsed patter inaccessible. But I must have made enough of an impression, because in very short order she just adopted me like the lovesick puppy I was, and took me home for the night, and the greatest romance of my life commenced.

The first night was a little bumpy, but I must have showed potential. Maybe she just was bored. But by the second, we got all the kinks worked out, and by the third we both knew we'd be inseparable lovers, so she gave me a spare key to her flat that sat atop The Cafe Brasil on the corner of Frenchmen and Chartres Street.

Not exactly pragmatism at its finest, but when you are caught in the middle of the maelstrom of an endorphin fueled biological imperative, pragmatism gets thrown out the window. The sound of her voice in my ear reduced me from human form into a puddle of gelatinous, pre-evolutionary primordial goo.

I would lie awake and wait in her boudoir, the walls painted Chinese red with a Pepto-Bismol pink trim, like a starving lion waiting for prey to pass his sight line. I had only one mission. Devour completely. And when she arrived home from work (at either 3:15, or 4:15am, depending on the rotation at Pat O's), devour I did. By the break of every day, we dropped out in total exhaustion in a bedroom that had transformed into an apres meal bone yard permeated with the sweet stench the human funk of love gone mad. My tarot card had been dealt, and my future foretold. I was a way gone daddy.

Our lifetime bond of friendship was forged in the foundry of the unbearable heat of a sweat-soaked New Orleans summer.

She was talented, charismatic and beautiful at first encounter. Everything that I was not. But as those lazy days passed, I discovered more and more. She was brilliant. Well read and whip smart, equipped with a razor sharp Dorothy Parker-esque wit. Unending laughter was part our deal. She had boundless energy, and a lust for life experience that I had never encountered in any singular human... she was absolutely fearless, or it least it seemed that way. She had a complete set of R.Crumb trading cards carlessly tossed about her coffee table! I often talk about reading and receiving the subtle signs gifts that The Universe offers everyday, but I was caught in a Universal torrential rain, and experiencing total sensory overload. The Universe broke out the sledgehammer, took aim at the space right between my eyes, and swung with all of it's infinite might to make sure I didn't screw this one up.


When she walked into a room, she commanded it. Kim didn't just walk down the street, she sashayed down it, and all attention spans followed her wake, like rats following the Pied Piper of Hamlin, and she was absolutely oblivious to what was obviously happening all around her. And I was more than happy to walk behind her, assuming the role of a long haired Arthur Miller in sympathetic vibration to this French Quarter Bohemian version of Marilyn Monroe.

Every day revealed a new discovery for me, and although I had resigned myself to a lifetime of lonliness prior to meeting her, everyday I fell down the rabbit hole of consuming adoration that was seemingly bottomless, deeper and deeper. I was in total free fall. If I hit the bottom at high velocity and ended up as a fiery ball of mangled human wreckage I didn't care, because the eventual Wile E. Coyote poof of smoke at the bottom of the canyon was going to be worth every minute of the trip.

Love, and lightning, strikes when you least expect it. Especially in New Orleans, the land of dreams and epic thunder and lightning storms.

"Lightning and Thunder; Puts the World All A-Wonder"... Big Chief Monk Boudreau of The Golden Eagles Mardi Gras Indian Tribe.

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK, WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!


THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #9 (06/06/11)

LISTEN TO THE UNIVERSE YOU JACK ASS!

This 9th "Daily Dose" is directly connected to yesterday's 8th installment.

In yesterday's post, I talked about my sister Becky's first true love, Bobby Varno. and what an absolute profound effect he had on my life.

Bob is one of the greatest guys on the planet, bar none. Back in 1974, he was a true hero and role model for me... an upside down and left handed guitar gunslinger, that was really my first music teacher.

He guided me with a steady hand and showed me the ropes along with his younger brother Jimmy, of whom I played in my first band. They both would patiently strum out chords one note at a time so I could figure them out by ear on the piano.

Bob had impeccable musical taste. He fed me (and through my sister) a steady diet of required and essential listening, explaining the backstory behind each recording and how they related to one another.

So as I was writing yesterday's blog and thinking of the true importance and influence this man had on my life, I really wanted to express fully and with an open heart to anybody who might read the thing just how grateful I was to have had him as a mentor. He changed my life in a fundamental and beautiful way.

I haven't seen Bobby in over thirty years. When you can't express gratitude and thanks in private, then both have to be declared publicly in a true, real and authentic manner.You just have to throw it up into the Universe with pure love. You have to TESTIFY!

I needed to finish the eighth post, because downtown there was a "Taste Of Syracuse" festival, and there were a couple of acts that were "must sees" on my list, Just Joe and The Janglers, and the seminal power pop group The Flashcubes.

So mulling about before The Cubes stormed the stage, just guess who I ran into...

Yup. Bobby Varno. That's him in the above pic with yours truly.

Coincidence? I don't think so. I concentrated prayerfully about all that was good about this man and in a matter of minutes, he materialized before me in the flesh after a 30 year absence.

I may sometimes be dumb as a box of rocks, but if I have learned one thing on the planet its this: You give. You give, and you give, and you give some more: Do it without expectation of reciprocation and the power of creation will reward you like clockwork.

You have to be aware enough to know that you are receiving gifts of high value, because they may not always appear that way. They often manifest themselves as relationships, rather than stuff. You have to position yourself to receive them as well.

But this system works, no matter what human created dogma you might be tempted to attach to it.

We are all made of the same elemental stuff, and we are connected not only to each other but all the stuff that's flying around in the interstellar recycling system they call "The Universe". There's positive and negative electrical energy running through that entire system, through the infinite universe, and through ourselves like alternating current.

Positive force begets positive sympathetic results. Negative force begets negative sympathetic results. Its really breathtakingly simple, once you take the leap of faith of its existence.

But you have to be totally tuned in and mindfully aware, which is why every minute of the day does not go by without me reminding myself jokingly, "Listen to the Universe, you jack ass!".

To turn away, ignore, or cognizantly turn this system off is obtuse dumbassery at its limbic snake-brained finest.

Don't "Try": "Do". Don't parasitically "Take":"Give". Don't thoughtlessly destroy, following some scorched earth policy to serve your own needs at the expense of the needs of others: "make" instead. Don't "Hate": "Love". Don't harbor resentment: "Forgive". Don't point the crooked finger of blame: find your own personal responsibility in any adverse situation, because that's the place where future usable wisdom resides. Embrace failure and the lessons learned from it, instead of being paralyzed be the fear of failure.

But most of all try very hard to see the unseen connective tissue between any and all events and points in the continuum. If you look hard enough you'll see it, and be better off for having seen it.

That's what this blog is about. Please be careful to note that I have not "monetized" it in any way, shape or form.

No ads, No Google Adsence, no banners. This is me giving as hard as I possibly can, and I will continue to do so at the same level for the next year. I keep my promises, and maintain my integrity throughout. If someone wants to position themselves to receive anything of value that I may be offering? I can't control that side of the equation.

I can cite many instances of proof where this system is an actuality. It exists. But I have proof in hand, delivered as recently as yesterday. His name is Bobby Varno.




AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK, WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!



THANK YOU,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"