Nice Tetons, By The Way.

Tired of being stuck at home, we planned a long weekend trip to the Tetons with John, Emily and the kids.

First stop was Craters of the Moon National Monument. We'd been there before in 2010, but this time we were looking forward to seeing the night skies, since the area is part of the Central Idaho Dark Skies Reserve. 

We hiked up Inferno Cone.

The view from the top was spectacular.

O fell in love with this old tree.

We had booked a motel in Arco, about 30 minutes from the park. Arco touts itself as the first town in the US to be powered by atomic energy (in 1955!). It's small and rundown (the motel was a bit sketchy), but it does have a great road food restaurant, the Pickle Spot, where we had dinner. Good burgers, good beer list, great fried pickles (even a pickle popsicle that we were not brave enough to try).

Just after sunset, we drove back to Craters and parked, waiting for full dark. Unfortunately, the nearly full moon almost completely obliterated the night sky. We did see a satellite, a shooting star, three planets, and of course that glorious moon!

The next morning we drove to Idaho Falls to meet John and family at Grandpa's Southern BBQ for lunch. Excellent barbecue! Grandpa's is one of the few Black-owned businesses in the area, and Grandpa, who grew up in Kentucky really knows his way around a smoker.

From Idaho Falls, we made our way over the Tetons into Wyoming. 

The shadows were lengthening on the hills as we pulled into Jackson. We were booked at the Wyoming Inn, a very nice hotel, while John and family had booked a campground at Colter Bay on Jackson Lake, about 45 minutes north of town.

O and I walked around Jackson, then had an excellent dinner outdoors at Cafe Genevieve. The town was crowded with end-of-season tourists, nearly all adhering to the Teton County mask mandate. 

The next morning we headed to the Davidson-Nielsen encampment.

The skies were mostly cloudy and there was smoke from a nearby wildfire, but the Tetons were as grand as ever.

The trees were in full autumn colors.

Truly a beautiful place.

We all hiked along the lake for a couple miles.

We had a close encounter with a deer who seemed unimpressed by us. We actually saw a lot of wildlife on the trip: pronghorns, bison, deer, chipmunks, even a small black bear.

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The magnificent fall colors were everywhere.

It was a lovely day for a family outing.

Mirabel however was not happy to learn that she couldn't watch something on her iPad at her usual 4:00 viewing time. "But it's my tradition!"

By the next morning she was feeling much happier for our mountain gondola ride.

The gondola takes you up about 3000 feet from the valley floor to 9100 feet. There are lots of hiking trails, a restaurant, and sweeping views of the Snake River valley, muted by the haze and smoke, but still spectacular.

And hang gliding! Next time we plan to do tandem glider rides.

We had an amazing time: lovely vistas, excellent food and drink, and a constant flow of great conversation and laughter.

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My Musical Journey. Part 21: Minnie the Moocher.

My mom loved the song "Minnie the Moocher." She would sometimes sing parts of it as she cleaned house or cooked. So I grew up knowing the song and that was about smoking opium, but it wasn't until I was in my early 20s that I heard it from the man who wrote it: Cab Callaway.

What a singer! His distinctive voice has such range. And his band was excellent. Dizzy Gillespie and many other jazz stars got their start with Cab.

"Minnie the Moocher" was the first single by a Black performer to sell over a million copies. It was featured in a very weird Betty Boop cartoon and in the Blues Brothers movie. 

"The Hi-De-Ho Man" is one of my favorites. His vocal range and scat singing are just incredible.

And no one ever rocked a zoot suit like Cab.

Cab's career continued almost until his death in 1994. In 1981 he made three appearances on Sesame Street. 

I saw him in the late 80s at the Venetian Room in the Fairmont in San Francisco. His voice was still amazing and he still had the moves, even in his 80s!

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My Musical Journey. Part 20: I'm A Lonesome Fugitive.

While living in Chico during college, I was lucky enough to find a very small one-bedroom, furnished house for $35 a month plus yard work. The yard was big and included walnut and almond trees as well as peach and apricot and a gorgeous flowering mimosa. There was also a big front porch and a noisy swamp cooler. It was perfect for an introverted college boy.

One day, my cousin Chris showed up. The last I had seen him, he was a 10-year-old Cub Scout with buck teeth who played violin. Now he had gone full hippie: long hair and beard, hitchhiking across the state with just a backpack and a mandolin.

We drank cheap jug wine late into the night and talked politics and music. He assured me that "Don't Mess With Bill" by the Marvelettes was a work of genius "way ahead of its time" and played some great country songs on the mandolin.

I was especially taken by "I'm A Lonesome Fugitive" and "Sing Me Back Home" by Merle Haggard. I soon became a big fan of his, especially the songs that came out his brief time in prison.

I bought his newest album: "Okie From Muskogee," recorded live in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and loved it. This was the time of the First Culture War, and many people took the song "Okie From Muskogee" as a straightforward political statement--"We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street." But I thought it was hilarious. I mean "We like holding hands and pitching' woo?" come on. Later Merle insisted that the song was always meant as a joke, and I want to believe him.

Whichever way you take it, the album is a classic. You have to love the part where Merle is given the key to the city by the mayor. 

Merle has a lot of great drunk songs, too.

I also appreciated Merle's take on the music of Jimmie Rodgers (the Singing Brakeman) and Bob Wills (King of Lone Star Swing), and over the years I collected most of their work, too.

In 1971, I was able to see Merle in concert at the Hollywood Bowl. My sister and her boyfriend and my future first wife and I bought a front row box and packed a picnic dinner with plenty of wine. Merle's regular fans were a bit skeptical at first of the presence of four stoned hippies in their midst, but once they saw us enthusiastically singing along with every song, they decided to embrace us.

It was one of the best concerts I've ever attended.

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My Musical Journey. Part 19: Cold, Cold Heart.

When I was younger (so much younger than today), I loathed country music--the lugubrious singing, the twangy guitars, the corny lyrics. Then in college, a friend of mine introduced me to Hank Williams. Sure the lyrics were often corny and unintentionally hilarious, but they were also often cleverly constructed. The twangy guitars were satisfyingly bluesy. And the singing was touchingly heartfelt with a refreshingly rough edge.

Best of all, they were excellent to sing when you were drunk (I did mention that this was college). Hank's career was unfortunately short. He died of heart failure caused by the combination of alcohol, morphine and chloral hydrate at the age of 29. But in that brief career, he wrote dozens of classic country songs, becoming known as the "Hillbilly Shakespeare" because of his gift with lyrics.

The first songs of his I ever heard were "Cold, Cold Heart" and "Take These Chains From My Heart." I still love singing them when I get buzzed.

I think this is one of the best lyrics.

And this one is just plain fun to sing.

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My Musical Journey. Part 18: Bitches Brew.

When I was in my early teens, Miles Davis was music that my older (by 11 years) sister and her husband, an advertising exec, played while sipping a pre-prandial martini or two. They were especially fond of "Sketches of Spain," probably my least favorite Miles album. I liked Miles, but wasn't excited by his music. I preferred sax-based jazz (Coltrane, Stan Getz, Charles Lloyd) to trumpet-centered music. 

It wasn't until 1970 and the release of "Bitches Brew" that I really began to dig Miles. While Coltrane took jazz to remarkable spiritual heights, Miles decided to get funky and visceral. Fusing funk and rock tropes with his own spare, incisive horn work, he created a whole new genre of music. 

Of course, jazz purists howled that he'd sold out, but I loved it. I listened endlessly to the two discs on the Radio Shack system I'd bought with my dad's death benefit, reveling in the dark, multilayered, rhythmic gumbo that Miles and his band played down.

Later I discovered the live albums that he subsequently recorded in Japan, where fans really got what he was doing. I love those albums even more than "Bitches Brew:" "Pangea," Agartha," and "Dark Magus," especially. Wonderful dark, primal stuff.

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My Musical Journey. Part 17: I Am The Blues.

I lived in Chico from 1969 until I graduated from Chico State in 1971. I had inherited my father's old VW, but I didn't have much money for gas, so I hitchhiked a lot, especially when I went home for the holidays in Southern California or to visit my girlfriend and future first wife in Oakland.

In late '69, I hitched to Altamont to see the Rolling Stones free concert. I wound up sitting in the dirt about 100 yards from the stage next to a fat naked Mexican man who wept inconsolably through much of the concert. I was almost trampled when the Hell's Angels killed Meredith Hunter. 

In December of 1970, my dad died after being bedridden for about six months. I was sad and angry, but also determined to make something out of my life. I changed my major from anthropology to communications and blitzed through my final year in six months. Social Security sent me a survivors benefits check for $150. I used $75 of it to buy a fairly credible stereo system from Radio Shack. That little system served me well for many years, and always a reminder of my dad. Thanks, Dad.

On one of my Oakland trips I visited one of my favorite used record stores on Telegraph Ave. and discovered Chicago blues.

The album "I Am The Blues" by Willie Dixon is still one of my favorites. It has only nine songs, all written by Willie, and all blues classics that have been covered by pretty much every blues band ever: "Back Door Man," "I Can't Quit You, Baby," "Seventh Son," "Spoonful," "I Ain't Superstitious," "You Shook Me," "Hootchie Coochie Man," "Little Red Rooster," and "The Same Thing." All had been released by various blues artists like Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters in the 50s and early 60s, but it''s great to hear Willie doing his own material backed by some of Chicago's best session men.

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My Musical Journey. Part 16: King of the Blues Guitar.

1969 was a major turning point in my life. In 1968, after flunking out of college and losing my student draft deferment, I reported to the Selective Service Center in Santa Ana for my physical, expecting to be whisked off to Vietnam. Instead, I was classified 1Y, undraftable except in a national emergency. My bad eyesight had saved my ass. 

Without the draft and imminent death hanging over me, I went back to Orange Coast College to improve my grade average. In January 1969, a guy down the block who was classified 1A fled to Canada. His parents asked me to drive his VW van loaded with all his belongings to Vancouver for him. 

Even then I loved road trips and really loved the idea of doing one solo. I left Laguna early one morning in the underpowered, overloaded van. As the sun came up, I was pulling into Santa Barbara and the radio announced some exciting news: they were going to be playing an exclusive--the debut album of a brand new British supergroup called Led Zeppelin. 

I was a fan of Jimmy Page from his days with the Yardbirds, so from the first chords of "Dazed and Confused," I was hooked.

But the real musical revelation wouldn't occur until later in the trip.

I stopped in Chico, California to visit my cousin Ruth and her husband Tommy. He was an accomplished artist who taught at Chico State. I was stuck in Chico for several days because heavy snows closed the pass through the Siskyous, so I had time to fall in love with Chico and forge a bond with Tommy and Ruth. Later that year, I transferred to Chico State and began my college career anew, completing my last three years in two and a half with a 3.8 grade average.
But that was in the future; to get there I had to get through the Siskyous. I eventually did, making my way through the mountains in a blizzard at night without chains.

The next stop was Portland Oregon and a visit with my Uncle David. As I arrived in Portland, I heard the song that changed my musical tastes yet again: "Crosscut Saw" by Albert King.
I have always preferred Albert to B.B. The reason is his spare, uncluttered style. He bends and stretches the notes and makes each one count with little or no fill. To me his music has an almost Japanese/Zen quality, simple and elegant and clean. "Crosscut Saw" is a showcase for his style, featuring notes stretched out beyond all reason and a staccato drum track that is infectiously propulsive.

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"Oh, Pretty Woman" is another one of my favories.

From the Montreaux Jazz Festival, this is one of my favorite live sets. The great Rory Gallagher puts in an amazing solo, but Albert tops him.

The highlight of the rest of the trip was being detained and harassed at the border by agents who wouldn't believe that I wasn't fleeing the draft. I had to leave the van in Washington while I crossed into Canada. One of the owner's friends was finally able to retrieve the van after a few days.

I flew home from Vancouver, my first ever flight. I loved the sensation of flying. Still do.

Later I found out that, without telling me, the owner of the van had stashed a kilo of grass amongst his stuff. I was extremely lucky that the van wasn't searched or the story of my life would have been quite different. I never forgave him for that.

All in all, the trip was quite a rite of passage for me. Years later, I was able to see Albert King a couple times at the Golden Bear, a very small venue in Huntington Beach. He played "Crosscut Saw."

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My Musical Journey. Part 15: The Fugs.

Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and Ken Weaver wanted to call the band they formed in 1964 "The Fucks." That obviously didn't fly in those days, so they borrowed the sound-alike that Norman Mailer had used in "The Naked and the Dead:" "fug."

Sanders and Kupferberg were poets and part of the NY scene that included Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. I liked Ginsberg's "Howl" and was blown away by Burroughs, especially "Nova Express." I discovered The Fugs in 1966 mainly due to their antiwar stance. I was 18 and struggling to stay out of the draft, so their savagely satirical, scatological lyrics against the war appealed to me greatly.

I especially loved their third album, "It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest." "Wide Wide River" is still a pretty accurate description of the situation we find ourselves in. 

The album also includes one of the weirdest and greatest songs ever written: the Country-Western lament "Rameses the Second is Dead, My Love."

The Fugs continued to play and record into the 2000s, jamming with the likes of Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, and Ray Davies.

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My Musical Journey. Part 14: The Mothers of Invention.

Frank Zappa wanted to call his band "The Mothers," but Verve Records and the rest of the music industry in 1966 weren't cool with that, so the Mothers of Invention were born.

Zappa was a brilliant and innovative musician, and also an outspoken political satirist. He was angry and he was sarcastically funny. That combination was like catnip to me, since I was angry and sarcastic and I aspired to be funny.  The first three albums, "Freak Out!", "Absolutely Free," and "We're Only In It For The Money" fueled my growing disaffection with the conventional pieties of mid-sixties America with classics like "Hungry Freaks, Daddy," "Plastic People, and "Brown Shoes Don't Make It."

The wonderful "Sgt. Pepper" parody cover.

Still one of my favorite songs:

Even though Aunt Jemima is no more, I still love this song:

The lyrics and the attitude were what attracted me at first, but later I came to appreciate Zappa's compositions and the band's musicianship and tight arrangements, as well as their talent for improvisation in the albums "Uncle Meat," "Weasels Ripped My Flesh," "Burnt Weenie Sandwich," and "Hot Rats." All still masterpieces.

Zappa later became too jokey for me, pursuing money with juvenile novelty songs like "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow" and "Valley Girl." I stopped listening during this phase of his career, but rediscovered him in the early 80's when he released "Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar," a triple album box set of his guitar solos.

I really have a hard time listening to his later lyrical efforts, but his instrumental albums are still excellent, especially "Make A Jazz Noise Here" and "The Grand Wazoo." I love the way he uses unusual time signatures, often having different band members play in different tempos at the same time. Really amazing stuff.

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My Musical Journey. Part 13: The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

When Jimi first hit the radio, he sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. Hell, he sounded like nothing anyone had ever heard before. The growls and shrieks of feedback, the backward guitar tracks, the stunning guitar work—you could readily believe he was indeed experienced.

And he just got better as he went along. His experimental 3-D soundscapes on “Electric Ladyland,” pointed to a a new mode of music that unfortunately he didn’t live to explore. As much as I love his live work, his studio work was truly visionary, so much so that Miles Davis cited him as an inspiration for his electric fusion direction that began quietly on “In A Silent Way,” and exploded on “Bitches Brew.” If you can inspire Miles, you’ve really got something.

I often wonder where Jimi’s vision would have taken him if he’d lived. It’s a loss I feel greatly.

The great blues jam session "Voodoo Child."'

Here's an interesting article from Rolling Stone.

https://www.rollingstone.com/.../jimi-hendrix-experience.../

And here's a cool "making of" video of "Are You Experienced?"

 https://youtu.be/F2zavD9w98E

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My Musical Journey. Part 12: Bluesbreakers

My love for electric blues really took off when I discovered the Bluesbreakers. Eric Clapton was indeed God in my book. Later I would discover Otis Rush and all the other Chicago bluesmen that Mayall’s style derived from. 

Still the Bluesbreakers did a masterful and respectful job of bringing blues to the rock audience and a whole new generation. Their love for blues inspired me to seek out a wide range of roots blues, from Robert Johnson to Vera Hall to Blind Willie Johnson. And it’s still a great album featuring some of Clapton’s finest guitar work. 

Mayall continued to make excellent music even after Clapton left the band. Clapton went on to co-found Cream and then joined several other short-lived bands before his long solo career. He done a lot of good stuff over the years, but, for me, none of it ever has reached the pure, time-stopping ferocity of his solos here.

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My Musical Journey. Part 11: The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators.

I have to admit that I bought this record just because it looked too loony to pass up. I was right. The deranged liner notes were clearly written by someone who had done way too much acid, and the lyrics were weird. But I came to love many of the songs and finally to appreciate the later career of the lead singer, Roky Erickson. Hospitalized for paranoid schizophrenia at one point, he also claimed that a Martian had inhabited his body.

He died last year, but between 1966 and 2019 he created a unique body of wonderfully crazed music.
From 1985, his classic, "Don't Slander Me.

Sample lyrics: Don't slander me, don't slander me, mama

Never say don't I don't know why

Don't slander me just, just for you, me, and I, I

Don't slander me, don't slander me, mama

Let the red lights riot, let the red lights riot

The Martians won't put you in a bad zoo

A bad form of the blues are nothing is not too hot for you

Not too hot, not too hot, not too hot for you.

Perhaps his most sublime effort: "Two-Headed Dog," which he wrote about the infamous experiment by Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov.
The lyrics need to be appreciated in full:
Two-headed dog, two headed dog
I’ve been working in the Kremlin
With a two-headed dog

Peace brought back, bought back
Relaxed be nyet brought back
Did you dry her out
Wind her out like jerky?
To me she’s healed to attack

Two-headed dog, two headed dog
I’ve been working in the Kremlin
With a two-headed dog

Children nailed to the cross
Pain does not look our hell
Certainly is not a spell
Sweet waste from a well

Two-headed dog, two headed dog
I’ve been working in the Kremlin
With a two-headed dog

Winds quiet in the night
Her body just blows messiah
Sickening sweet sight left or right
Is all right does not please my appetite

Two-headed dog, two headed dog
I’ve been working in the Kremlin
With a two-headed dog.

Vlad and his dog.

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My Musical Journey. Part 10: Break On Through.

The first rock concert I ever attended was the opening of the new Anaheim Convention Center in June 1967. Jefferson Airplane headed the bill and the first act was The Doors. 

Like everyone else I loved “Surrealistic Pillow” and Grace Slick, but I also loved the new band I’d been hearing on the radio—The Doors. “Break On Through” was in heavy rotation at the time and I was looking forward to seeing them live.

Unfortunately, a lot of my fellow concert goers did not feel the same. By the time Morrison was screaming his way through 11 minutes of “The End,” people were booing and yelling to “Bring on the Airplane!”

The Doors left without an encore.

I loved The Doors. Jim Morrison’s passionate poetry and soulful screams, Ray Manzarek’s formidable musicality, Robby Krieger’s gorgeous guitar lines, and Skip Spense’s jazz-inflected drumming just clicked with me. They started to go downhill for me after “Waiting for the Sun,” though. Morrison lost it and I lost interest. For a brief moment, though they truly opened the doors of perception for me.

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recorded fall 1966 - lyrics: You know the day destroys the night Night divides the day Tried to run Tried to hide Break on through to the other side Break on...

My Musical Journey. Part 9: Rubber Soul.

I took my first acid trip in May of 1966, just before LSD was declared an illegal drug in California. It was an incredible trip in many ways, and the soundtrack was Rubber Soul by the Beatles.

I was not a Beatles fan at the time. I saw them as cynical purveyors of teenybopper pop with a fan base of screaming girls. Rubber Soul was different. The songs were more serious, more musically accomplished than anything they’d done before. “I’m Looking Through You” especially took on a cosmic significance that day. I was convinced that I could communicate telepathically with my friends. And I had a vision of God that still resonates with me today.

So “Rubber Soul” has a special place in my life. I became a Beatles fan, I loved “Revolver,” still their best album in my book, and of course “Sergeant Pepper.” I was less enthralled by their later efforts, though they continued to put out some great songs from time to time.

I took a few more LSD trips, but the purity of the acid that was available to me was not great, so I lost interest. I lost interest in the Beatles, too, as far as their new music went. But I still love their stunning middle period when they were the most innovative and influential music creators on the planet.

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