If you are new, the blog “top story” is a euphemism. It applies to almost any event that makes the blog, one of the few instances where I indulge in circular thinking. Even the least interesting story of the day could potentially make top—if it was the most negative thing and nothing else went down. This reasoning came about because I know people with lives so blah that nothing happens for years at a time. My least exciting day has more oomph to it than that. Considerably more.In the new band, one guitarist knows another ex-phone company employee. His story was virtually identical to mine. Started with high hopes, got into stress mode, took a buyout package, now lives better than the scoffing employees who stayed behind. The parallels don’t end there. The other guy also had blood pressure problems ten years later and a short but present list of stress-related conditions. He also remarked on 1987 about the ruthless changes, when the company got worried about competition.
That got me listening. I worked right through that transition. The company fear was that their highest trained people would leave and go to work against them for more pay. So the upper echelons changed the workplace to prevent that by breaking each job into components. There were to be no more jack-of-all-trades. I hated it. But that’s why today one guy runs the drop, a different man does the prewire, yet another installs the phone, and so on. These individual skills are not that transportable. Consequentially, the work became mundane repetition.
I cheated a bit on the new band. I took out my bass and played my old band tunes for a few hours. Memory lane, sigh, with so many parking spots. Unlike too many musicians, I see there is not a single song from my early teen bands still on my printout. Nary a one. I recall the music, “Gloria”, “Hey Joe”, “Last Kiss”, “Mendocino”, “Proud Mary”, but I don’t play them any more. Give me a second and I’ll check what is the oldest song I ever played that I still do. Vip, vip, vip, ah, here are my now-computerized archives. It comes as no surprise. “Folsom Prison Blues”, also my top earner.
I first played that song in 1966. It was not part of my regular act until 1987. And I didn’t bass solo it until 2008. Let me pull all my lists to see if I can make today more interesting. “Jambalaya” also goes back, but only until 1974. Nothing on my list has survived since 1988, the year I formed the band “Three Good Reasons”, which eventually became “Not Half Bad”.
It was during “Not Half Bad” that the country became my strongest influence. That was the era I met Gordie Walker, the closest thing I could call a role model. A zillionaire who gave it all up to go play guitar in a bar. Turned down, he did, a pro hockey career and a recording contract, saying he couldn’t stand the Los Angeles bullshit. Though he never talked about it, I heard he was gigging with Roy Orbison at the time.
By 1989 I could not ignore the steady money provided by country music. By the early 1990s, I was living off my band and banking my paychecks. My music income was a steady $330 per week plus tips. I had so much cash, I lived in Venezuela for two years while still working full time at the phone company. (You figure out how I did it.) But thanks to a woman, I quit playing in 1992 for almost eight long years. I quit going to see other bands. I didn’t own a bass during that stretch.
Since I began playing solo bass in 2007, here are the other top earning tunes that have been on my list since:
Sea of Heartbreak
These Boots (Are Made for Walking)
Long-Haired Country Boy
Party Till The Money Runs Out
Spiders & Snakes
There were other contenders, but this is the music that endured. These seven songs form the core of everything I’ve done since. There’s competition as I’m continually on the lookout for tunes that need resurrection. Of those, the top earners are “Oh Lonesome Me”, a tune I personally dug out of the mountain and brought back to life, and my off-the-wall presentation of “Tennessee Flat Top Box”.
This was just not that great a day. But I’ll wrap it up by discussing my fan mail. A few readers have taken offence over my stabs at the hotel industry. They say I don’t know what I’m talking about. Invariably, they are middle-of-the-road types who do as they are told and are convinced life would be great if we all had the wherewithal do the same. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The world will always be full of sheeple.
Be aware that hotels and I do not get along. Please do not argue how easy it is to get a firm hotel price on line. Why? Because it isn’t and I’ll say it one more time: I do NOT own a credit card. This, throughout my long and eventful life, has rarely been a problem, and one of those problems occurs when hotels shove credit down my throat.
Secondly, anyone who says it is easy on-line is probably dealing with a dot com discount dealer, not the hotel. Try doing so without a credit card before calling me naive. For the record, my credit is 100% excellent. I happen to be one of the 17% of credit-worthy Americans who decline to have live beyond their means. Nobody, repeat nobody, who lives on credit is qualified to lecture me about right and wrong. They all need reminding of the one thing those millions of Americans who lost their houses have in common.
I’m merely trying to get firm prices to plan my trip in advance. I’ve done this for decades and know precisely when I get the runaround. Don’t we love managers who act as if they’re teaching me how this new-fangled Internet thing works? Fact: hotels are using the Internet as a smokescreen to under-quote their prices. I’ve only been taken once in the past twenty years, by MicroTel in Lexington, Kentucky in 1999. The sign said $39; the scumbags charged me $79.
Let’s talk practical experience. Some people are so gutless they won’t leave home without plastic. Less than six months ago I drove a motorcycle 2/3 of the way across America without any damn credit card and without getting lied to. The motels were fifty bucks, plus or minus ten. I paid cash, everybody was happy. I met excellent people, strangers who helped me out, and I found Demopolis, Alabama. None of that would have happened on credit.
But now I get hotel quotes on-line for $59 per night. When I telephone to make the reservation, it becomes $139 per night. That’s what I’m talking about. Gee, I must have fallen asleep and forgotten how to read. Who remembers the 1970s scam where the hotels used to sell discount booklets? When you arrive, they are always out of “those rooms”. Well, this new Internet math, where 59 = 139 confunds me (not a typo). Must be one of them there new tricks you can’t teach an old dog.
ADDENDUM
How, you ask, is the new textbook on electronics? I knew you’d get to that. I’ve gone back to deep-read the relevant sections. Printed in 1972, it contains allusions to the same bad writings I’ve ranted against these days. There’s a quip that expresses the disgust I’ve decried about geeks who try to teach. Worded nicely on page 192 the authors called it “the prejudice of the engineer”. Cute. The book has a number of similarly revealing single sentences but they require brain-breaking extraction.
As an example, most of us never think about why a circuit board is mainly capacitors and resistors surrounding the chips. One footnote (who reads those) mentions that resistors above 30k and capacitors above 100 pF “cannot be manufactured profitably” by the integrated circuit factories. Ah, follow the money. Most of the book is over my head, but that part I get. That one tidbit has prodded me into setting aside a precious evening soon to read Chapter 7, the manufacture of integrated circuits.
