One year ago today: June 25, 2016, the Limestone Country Club
Five years ago today: June 25, 2012, they have ‘happiness engineers’.
Nine years ago today: June 25, 2008, I never got paid for this.
Random years ago today: June 25, 2010, they love to pay taxes.
On the Amtrak to Miami. Agt. R gave me a lift to Winter Haven, which is further away than the Lakeland Station. But Lakeland involves a transfer which, for the extra 11 miles adds nearly an hour to the journey. I was curious if Amtrak stopped that horrid practice of reserving window seats for families. Like your kid is going to stare out the window for any length of time. I call it the anti-bachelor policy which explains why I ride the Amtrak these days only by necessity. My whole purpose of taking the train is to enjoy the scenery. There’s never any women on board except dotty of grandmothers. The ones who smell like foot powder.
Because Shure only sells them in packages of 4 or 5, I didn’t check past the $20 price tag. Shure was once an outstanding company and probably could have gotten away with such a rip-off. But they stayed the same and all the other companies finally caught up in quality. The Shure microphones have a better bass response so it was a favorite of my teen bands. Gotta get a Shure 585, we always said.
Ah yes, memories of those bands. They were complete startups, since I was first in those small towns. There was a country band from a town 28 miles away, but these were a family of brothers and they were pretty lousy, but friendly. They had only two beats, fast and slow. They played the dreaded twangy whiney country which, compared to The Beatles, was just not kewl. They were also old men, something like 23 or 25 years old already. So, like, don’t listen to them much or you might catch the old people thinking disease.
Shows all the worlds airplanes in real time (zoom in).
Strange I can’t recall that band’s name, but I will because it was an acceptable Mennonite name. They had those old “war club” type microphones that were so uncool compared to our 585. The brother that was the worst guitarist, they relegated him to play bass, and all he could do was single note follow the other guitarist, really, note for note and beat for beat. They played that song, “Last Kiss” at least three times a night. The Comets. That’s the name, they were the Comets. Which quickly became the Vomits.
For them, setting up to play was an elaborate ritual, carefully unfolding each power cord, etc. The oldest man, Garth, he believed in band uniforms, if they consisted of a white shirt and bow tie, that is. They did sort of resemble country preachers. And they played every instrumental tune that made the country hit parade. “Peter Gunn”, “Wipeout”, “Walk Don’t Run”, and “Ghost Riders”. They would not play “Hey Joe” because the lyrics mentioned a gun. Hey, I told you it was a small town. Fewer people to laugh at my family.
Vintage sewing machine.
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This is the newly re-introduced Volkswagen “bus”. Style-wise, it can’t compete with the original but I will check it out. The connection with this vehicle and today’s blog is the train and my early bands. You’ll rarely get me more nostalgic than riding the train. The popular band vehicle of the 60s and 70s was, in the movies anyway, the old Volkswagen bus. But that was a near total fabrication. Why? I’ll tell you why.
They were fat cat draft dodgers rejecting a system but not rejecting the daddy’s money that system provided them. Only a relatively few wealthy “students” could afford to run a mini-bus around all summer instead of “working for the man”. Like the liberals of today, they had never had to work for a living or start a business, but consider themselves expert on such matters. They don’t mind paying taxes as long as they can vote to compel others to pay them, too.
Let me burst the bubble further. Nor were these people the easy-going types portrayed by Hollywood. Every one of them was in it for himself and if a mini-bus helped him get laid, he’d get his hands on one. This was the decade where loans to teenagers were becoming bank policy—why you can pay them back when you graduate and get that fancy job. Economists call this the “expectation of higher earnings” motive. That concept sold like hotcakes and the mini-bus soon gave way to the customized $40,000 van of the 1980s. I know guys who dropped out of school to work in a mill to take out a loan to buy a van to go back and park in front of the school at noon break with the van doors open and the music blaring. That was perfectly legal back then, in case you are wondering.
And don’t believe the songs about touring the country funded by casual labor and living off the land. That’s another urban legend. It was just as tough and expensive to get around then as it is now. But a free place to crash helps, and that’s why I have the cPod. I may be doing a little work on that shortly again. I want to make a trip and the destination is a known hotel/motel rip-off zone. Yep, if there were hippies today, they could protest the hotel industry, though it is questionable whether a hippie would protest anything he personally needs himself once in a while. Is what I’m sayin’.
“The failure mode of clever is ‘asshole’.”
~ John Scalzi
The four-hour train trip got me thinking about the old band again. It was actually the second band I started, the one with the Campbell brothers. The same band that went along fine until my brother convinced them they didn’t have to listen to me. That was a dumb thing they did, oh, the band is still together, but it has not accomplished one new thing nor moved ahead since I left. Such people never realize when they are benefiting over something for nothing, and that something was my organizational skills. I even used to let them think they were better musicians that me, so once I quit, it was every man for himself and they got nowhere.
You see, this idea of teamwork and cooperation only works if there is a leader, and that leader is rarely the same person the team would elect. Bands are your classic example of a grinning democracy while in reality there is one tough-minded driving individual behind it all. Turn it into a true democracy and the band collapses. The major reason the original band is still together is because I taught one brother to play bass and the other to play guitar.
They quickly progressed to about a grade two music level and stayed there. In a quirky turnabout, because they could not grasp where I was coming from, I had to let them think they were better than they were. I was still too young, maybe 13 years old, to understand that most of my musical life would repeat much the same process. Most guitarists and bassists don’t have my level of classical piano and theory training. Not even the Circle of Fifths. I had one guy look it up and he came back arguing it was a Circle of Sixths or some load of crap. He just couldn’t admit I was right.
So I used the leisurely train trip to think and write, gang. That’s about as close to writing my memoirs as I’m likely to get. The photo is an alpenhorn, I’ve never seen one before. Only the Swiss could miss the concept of coiling the tube up so it would fit in a rucksack. This is from Carlton’s music, in Winter Haven, which is proving to be a much better appointed town than Lakeland. It is possible to walk around downtown and shop something more than tittie bars and pawn shops, take note Miami. When the good businesses move out, you can blame yourself.
ADDENDUM
Deciding it was early enough, we piled in the Blazer and drove to North Miami, where JZ tells me there was a bar full of women. You know, sometimes he is right, as long as you are not too concerned about quality. So we wound up where good old Barb is now waitressing. Was she surprised to see me in that part of town. There is this going-grey blonde lady standing by the pool table and I could tell she took an instant glow to me. So I breezed over there and chatted her up. She melted right into me, but at that moment, I see she had been playing pool with one of the barflies. Obviously she would not have been rubbing up to me if she was with him, but that look on his face wasn’t serene acceptance.
Plus, just two dudes like JZ and I even walking into that kind of place raises the IQ and everybody knew it. The regulars quickly returned to their smell seats and glared at us. But all old men, no danger. I quickly left the pool area and joined JZ at the bar, next to these two bland looking guys. JZ is joking with the first guy and I’m helping him keep it going, what the hell, nothing else going on. After ten minutes maybe, the other guy speaks up saying, “You two guys voted for Trump, I can just tell.” In a bar.
An elbow to JZ’s rib brings the explanation that is not a guy, but the neighborhood lesbian who “had her first man a year ago”. Jeez, one look at her and I surmised that was probably her own fault. Later, I find out this is the one JZ thinks is so beautiful and such. Sure fooled me. She clung onto the edges of the conversation trying to politicize things, but that’s a quick way to get excluded from any group I’m in. Ask my brothers. Imagine, a butch feminist libtard trying to make brownie points when I’m around. It was fun, but we decided to leave.
At this moment, the pool lady piles over asking where we are going, hint, hint. I told sorry ma’am, your response was not exclusive enough for me. When I walked to the bar, you stayed behind and finished your pool game. Then you went and sat at the far end eavesdropping on me for ten minutes before deciding I was worth talking to. And the first thing you did was ask me for a drink. I’m no hero, but that is not how you approach people like me. I’m serious in that, folks. Compared to the jerk-offs and clowns that infested that place, if you need more than two seconds to spot the difference between them and I, well, you’re a bad risk to start with. (Aside to Billie-Bill, I did not just say I was great. I am referring to a comparison.)
I’ve never had a lasting relationship with any woman who did not glom on to me instantly. Um, and don’t go thinking all the ones who do glom are my type.
Last Laugh
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